Since Catherine Breillat’s 1975 writer-director debut, A Real Young Girl, the recurring theme she’s been conspicuously single-minded about is the stripping of our hegemonic social morays, the better to confront us with them—especially when it comes to questions of feminine sexuality. So many of her films revolve around the emergent physical identities of adolescent girls on beachside holiday with their families that one cannot help but presume a certain measure of the autobiographical in her work—though, for Breillat’s sake as much as for our own lasting peace-of-mind as her audience, I certainly hope that storytelling craft has trumped historical accuracy in the resulting pictures. There is sexual assault in Breillat’s films, there is manipulation, there is incest. There is an occasional murder. In many of them our young female lead arrives at a disposition that we might charitably describe as unconventionally empowered.
All of her films are thus challenging to watch, but it is with Fat Girl that Breillat’s unflinching and slow-panning creative voice at last finds its tricky harmony with the difficult subject matter, resulting in a finished product that manages to be fully enthralling without feeling prurient, methodical without feeling labored, and, most importantly, tied-up with the red-ribbon of unexpected denouement that manages to be stunningly arresting without feeling stridently dissonant or gratuitous.
Reboux is Anais Pingot, a stout if not exactly morbidly obese twelve year-old, trapped in the resentful wake of her glamorous parents and even-more-glamorous fifteen year-old sister Elena, played by Roxanne Mesquida. As ever in Breillat’s films, the family hires a seaside villa in the south of France for the summer, whereupon Elena becomes infatuated with Fernando, a college-aged Spaniard played by Liburo DiRenzio.
In short order Anais finds herself stranded at the far side of the girls’ shared bedroom, thence to bear involuntary witness to every imaginable outlet for Elena-and-Fernando’s disequality of previous experience. The middle act of the film thus unfolds as an unnervingly passive-aggressive contretemps, with Elena’s displaced self-hatred by day followed abruptly by her saccharine and abruptly over-sentimental pleas for her little sister’s complicity at bedtime. We understand at a stroke that Elena is invoking a time-practiced spell on her sister to get what she wants, here: plucking Anais’ heartstrings like the access-code on an ATM. The scene in which Elena attempts to quiet Anais’ tears by force-feeding her, directly across the kitchen table from their impassive mother and father, is but the tamest specimen from this exquisitely and pitch-perfectly uncomfortable second act.
None of which is what gets people talking about this incredible movie and keeps them that way, of course: Rather it is that thunder-striking final vignette that crystallizes the manic, pissed-off genius of the director’s creative vision—an episode about which any more said would spoil the whole experience of the film. It is and forever will be, we understand at once, the event in Anais’ life that gathers all those voyeuristic wayposts into something far more obviously a journey—elevating the already memorable experience of the thing into the club of that rarest of ugly ducklings, the not-just technically, but emotionally superlative motion picture.
The Key Grip gives Fat Girl five bald heads, his highest rating.
Dave O'Gorman
(The Key Grip)
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Equipment Review: The Denon DVD-2930ci
If you've read a single AV-related post of mine, in any venue, then you know without my having to say so that the biggest problem-area in my system hasn't been the DVD-player. Neither has it been the amplifier, the television, the speakers, or the cabling. What it has been, is an inscrutable bug somewhere in my electrical system. I've installed dedicated lines, common-mode chokes, isolation transformers, even improvised additional AC-cord shielding using dryer duct. I've replaced speaker wires and interconnects and the romex in the wall. I've tried everything. Nothing has worked. Thwarted in my efforts to diagnose and solve the problem, I've resorted to more-or-less living with it: experimenting with different configurations in my rube-goldbergy power filtration scheme until the recurrence of the issue was reduced to acceptable, once-a-month levels.
I needed to say this right up-front today because it goes a long way to explaining how I ever got to meet the Denon DVD-2930ci in the first place: Were it not for this weird problem with my electricity (whatever it is), I'd still be the proudly contented owner of a Sony NS3100-ES that is now chugging away in the home of a close friend without incident. I would almost certainly still be the proudly contented owner of its bigger brother, the NS9100-ES -- had the same bizarre issue not compromised its performance in precisely the same way. As high-end machines for the enjoyment of conventional DVD's go, the Sonys are improbably hard to beat in nearly every respect. They do some things very well and other things better than any other player I've ever owned. But here's the thing: all the DVD-players I've ever owned, do at least some things better than any other player I've ever owned, and all of them have either immediately or eventually exhibited nagging issues that "forced" me into trying something else.
This, I believe, leaves me in an unusually advantageous position to comment on each one -- as if someone were telling you about his current tube amplifier after having worked his way through... well, all the others. The Denon DVD-2930ci, then, is the conventional DVD-player I review here because, after brief stops at Sony (the aforementioned 3100 and 9100, sequentially), Oppo (the 980H), Marantz (the DV-7001) and Pioneer (the DV-79 Avi), the Denon is the machine that I have "ended up with." At least until my house eats it.
Thinking Out of the Box
I bought my unit new-in-the-carton from an Ebay seller and straight away I was impressed with its compact, weighty build philosophy. The front faceplate is understated without being severe; the remote is thick and heavy and thoughtfully arrayed; the profile of the machine is low without going all the way to that awkwardly self-conscious, credit-cardy slim that seems to be so popular with so many vendors these days, but which always leaves me feeling like best practices are being sacrificed for trendy cosmetics that are sure to look as dated and silly ten years from now as the high-gloss silver chasses of the mid-seventies.
Rear-apron connectivity includes the predictable HDMI, optical and coaxial digital, and legacy video outputs, as well as both two- and five-channel analog audio ports -- the last of which is an absolute necessity in my rig, powered as it is by a discrete analog multichannel tube-integrated amp (the arrestingly good Dared DV-6C, about which much more anon). Connection was straightforward, though the needlessly close placement of the six multichannel audio sockets left me with the customary anxiety about having compromised the circuit integrity of the piece before I even got to play with it.
There is actually no really good reason for these sockets to be as close together as they tend to be on the rear aprons of home entertainment equipment: If you've had as many top covers off as I have, then you know that on the inboard side of these connections the circuits for each channel disperse to all corners of the board. Why, then, do I always have to wonder if my thicker-by-design RCA hozzles are cracking the shells of the interconnect hubs before I've even heard the first note of sound through each new machine? (I warn you not to respond casually: If you can answer that one, I'll next be asking you why control-W, which can easily be typed instead of shift-W, is the signal to my computer to discard fourteen pages of unsaved typing by closing my active fucking browser window. I digress.)
Life in Hell. Complete with Owners' Manual.
After connection, of course, the next step was to power-up the machine and put both myself and it through the aggrieved gauntlet of initial setup menus -- aided as usual by a badly written and needlessly over-stylized owners' manual. After the standard, excruciating preliminaries about what a power cord looks like and where to put the batteries in the remote control, the next four pages -- labeled "Making the initial settings" -- proved, on lengthy further review, to be nothing more than a fussy sub-table of contents (e.g., "HDMI Audio Setup: HDMI Speaker Setup: Channel Level: Test Tone: Front LCH: 19").
As ever in this maddening contemporary world of if-you-mind-this-happening-then-you-must-be-the-Unabomber, a simple and inexpensive beta-test of the usefulness and understandability of the manual would've saved me a far larger dose of frustration on the customer end of the bargain. Then again, I would seem to be the only person to have noticed that our most frequently-used piece of consumer electronics is also the one we can't try before we buy it, and once we do buy it we can't get rid of for two whole years at a time -- so I suppose when it comes to consumer advocacy I've got bigger fish to fry than clamoring for an occasional double-blind experiment to see if anybody can read their owners' manuals. Point being, of all the bad owners' manuals out there, the Denon DVD-2930ci's was one of the worst -- surpassed only in its technocratic inscrutability by that of the Sony's, and surpassed in pointlessly fussy layout by... well, nobody's, really.
Much ado about nothing? Yeah, you'd think so, wouldn't ya. So did I. It was only after I thought I'd completed the lengthy setup process that I realized that this particular frustration, in this particular instance, was anything but academic. Indeed the frustration I had with this particular manual would in the end very, very, very nearly result in my having to box the entire unit up and resell it:
The trouble began with the fact that, for reasons apparent only to the manufacturer, the Denon DVD-2930ci is shipped from the factory with the HDMI output completely disabled. This means that spending half an hour on your hands-and-knees, hooking everything up the way you have a half-dozen times before, will reward you with a rich, sprawling, fifty-inch-diagonal plasma screen of nuthin'. To turn on the HDMI output, it happens, you must re-read the entire manual twice -- once to verify that you haven't missed a conspicuous step on account of your own haste, and a second time to find, in four-point type, the words "Upon Purchase" next to the place on page twenty-nine where the manual describes how to toggle-off the only video output that anybody on the planet ever uses. Then, just to make an evening of it, you have to reason-out that "Upon Purchase" means that this setting is the factory default. As for just what was so terribly deficient about the term "factory default," or why it would occur to anyone, anywhere, that defaulting an upconverting DVD-player to output video that isn't upconverted, I won't presume to ask.
Moreover, the act of toggling the HDMI output to the common-sense "on" position isn't even available, after having invested all this time and frustration into discovering the problem there. Instead the user must choose between "HDMI-YCbCr" and "HDMI-RGB," a distinction that not only doesn't serve any technical necessity, but which I for one can't really seem to accept as factually possible. Correct me if I'm wrong about this, do, but it seems to me that component is component, RGB is RGB, and HDMI is -- well, HDMI. Not only have I never seen a user-option that would conflate two of these three formats together into some freakish human-centipede-wannabe like this, I don't actually get how such a selection is even supposed to be practicable, let alone decided-upon by the user.
The manual, of course, says absolutely nothing informative about the decision, but in this case at least the folks at Denon are in good company: All owners' manuals are bad these days, and all DVD-player manuals are bad in this very peculiar way. They all manage to take four pages explaining how to use patch cords to hook the thing to a TV and an amp, and ZERO pages explaining what the results would be if I toggle some third-level-sub-menu setting between "Linear-PCM" and "96kHz Direct," or some other inscrutable but ominously important-sounding gibberish. As is always the case, I ended up skipping the first eleven pages of the manual and then guessing about the only video-related setting that could even hypothetically make any difference. And there's no excuse for that, either.
Life in Hell. Complete with Owners' Manual. Part II.
If this had been where the Denon's setup hassle ended, the shame of this preposterous set of inside-baseball decisions on the design table would've redounded to the company's shame for a very long time indeed. But regrettably my colorful evening of grappling with this machine's frightfully bad user interfaces was only just beginning, as I noticed immediately when I started playing the first DVD and realized that I didn't have multichannel sound.
It happens that if you connect the DVD-2930ci via the multichannel analog audio outputs, and then slavishly follow every single step in the owners' manual for making this connection work, not only isn't there any sound output from the center and surround sockets, but the setup menus don't even allow the user to skate to the appropriate sub-page to fix the problem! Instead, when the user finds the option to adjust multichannel sound output, he attempts to scroll to that choice and discovers that it is "grey'ed": the remote just skates completely over the entire sub-menu and directly to a lower option called "compression." (Since that's something we all need more of in our audio these days, apparently. You know, I was just thinking that what I'd been really missing in my DVD sound, is more compression.)
It went on this way for the better part of two hours: I, in increasingly profane exasperation, consulting the manual again and again, then skating over the only sub-menu I wanted; the machine stoically responding with still more, non-downmixed, two-channel sound. For the length of a feature presentation, I tried switching and un-switching every other setting I could think of, then went back to the manual and re-read the same eleven passages for the eleventh time, then cursed loudly enough for the neighbors to cover their childrens' ears, then started all over again.
Finally, as a last resort before boxing the whole thing up and getting rid of it, I retreated to the friendly confines of the internet discussion fora -- there to discover that the exact-same problem had been exasperating a veritable can-can line of other would-be happy customers, over and over and over again, dating across the entire four-year history of this product's existence. And the thing is, some of their posts were completely un-responded, meaning they'd either figured out the solution on their own, or spent the entire period of time between then and now without analog mulitchannel sound from their analog-multichannel-capable DVD-player. Products in my particular household have been thrown against walls and stomped up and down on, for less.
It turns out that, *after* having (1) toggled the HDMI audio off, (2) toggled the sound from two-channel virtual surround to discrete multichannel, and (3) selected "direct" mode to disable the digital sound-output circuitry altogether, the customer must *THEN* switch the HDMI sound output (which has, you understand, already been utterly de-activated in three different ways, on three different setup screens) from multichannel to two-channel. You read that right, folks: Your completely dead HDMI sound signal has to be two-channel in order for your only live sound signal to be anything else, with this machine.
There is, I perhaps don't have to say, absolutely, no, reason, for this much trouble. If the analog output sockets were active by factory default, it wouldn't hurt a thing in the digital domain. And even if it did, toggling the HDMI sound to the off position (even once, much less three times), should surely be enough of an indication that the user expects to hear something through the analog connections.
More to the point, the owners' manual says *N*O*T*H*I*N*G* about this. I had to find out for myself, more-or-less completely by accident, by reading a dozen blind threads on different discussion boards until at last finding the solution, authored by someone else who discovered it completely by accident. But really, I shouldn't complain this much: After all, it had only taken me a total of four hours of slowly unraveling consumer satisfaction before I found a piece of information that could have appeared in boldface capital letters on the same page as the multichannel connection diagram. How silly of me to complain.
Impressions (Upon Emerging from Hell).
When I'd finally calmed down enough to actually play with it, the Denon DVD-2930ci exhibited several other interesting -- if less maddening -- quirks of personality that in total make it by far the most distinctive of the various models I've tried, from disc access to menus to picture to sound.
The spin-up time and time-to-menu-access of this machine are both noticeably unhurried (this, you understand, coming from a past and satisfied owner of the notoriously lethargic Sonys). On more than one occasion I inadvertently canceled my own instructions to the machine by hitting the same button twice on the remote, thinking I'd missed the infrared bulls' eye the first time. If the amateur review literature is any indication this bothers people far less easily agitated than myself, but my personal ace-in-the-hole in this instance is that, unlike most of the other things I've ranted on about in this cranky little trope, I don't actually give a shit about slow menu-access times. I've had such bad luck, on so many other fronts, that these days I'm pleasantly surprised when my disc media spins-up and plays *at* *all*. Indeed, pretentious as it may sound, I'm actually inclined to derive a certain vicarious, upper-crusty satisfaction from the wait -- as though seated in an expensive restaurant and in no hurry for the waiter to finish pouring the taste-sample of that Sauvignon Blanc he's just recommended. Still it should be said that long wait-times are frustrating for many would-be customers of this product, and I'd have to count myself among them if the wait were any longer than it is.
The HDMI video output, which I tried first at 720p YCrCb and then toggled to 720p RGB just to be sure, was surprisingly laid-back, almost muted-looking. For this, though, I had a fun and easy solution: I've always used the "cinema" presets on my Panasonic TH50 plasma, designed to suffuse the image in that faint hint of gauzy, cellulosy blush we've instinctually come to expect from our movie-going experience. But with past machines this effort has, unbeknownst to me, been actively canceled by those other players' tenacious insistence on bludgeoning every last black pixel until it has bled its last drop of black into the outlines of the figures on the screen.
The Sonys were particularly noteworthy in this regard: With the Panasonic set at all-neutral, the picture output from the 9100 was edgy-sharp to the point of being nerve-wracking; with the 3100 it was almost comically so. The Denon, it would seem, opts for a much quieter output philosophy -- the difference being analogous in some ways to that of the hyper-fidelity of every last microphonic detail emanating from McCormack or Linn or Bryston audio gear, on the one hand, vs. the more "musical" disposition of, let us say, Naim or YBA or McIntosh.
Had I not nulled-out the TV settings I would not have preferred the Denon's picture. But I did, and so I do. With the TV set at +13 sharpness (on a scale of -30 to +30), and +15 for picture (on the same scale), I found that the Denon could play nice on the tiniest details and still not distract me with that fatiguing, look-ma-no-hands vibe I'd always gotten from other high-end conventional DVD players.
The brightness, I should also mention, I left set at a jaw-droppingly-low minus-7. That's because this is the one and most-important trick to getting the most out of one's home-entertainment system: The factory-default brightness settings on TV's are preposterously too high, the better to compensate for the possibility that any one specimen ends up the floor-model in a seizure-inducingly over-lit retail showroom. Turn your brightness down as low as you can without having to strain to see the images in a day-for-night movie scene, and in the long-run your improvement in satisfaction will outstrip all but the most expensive of electronic upgrades. Everything about a home theater looks and feels better when the blacks are black.
What is the Frequency, Kenneth?
The counter-point to all this rosy, laid-back picture quality turns out to be the sound, which is as forward and intense as I'd be personally be able to tolerate. Adjusting the trim levels helped a little, but the catch here is that, as with several other players in its class, it is not possible to adjust the Front-Left and Front-Right trim below zero dB, so the only other choice is to over-rev the center- and surround channels and then turn the whole thing down at the amp -- yet another pointless design oversight that can easily (indeed almost has to) lead to distortion on particularly complex passages, especially when someone in the center of the frame is shouting over something noisy happening off to one side.
After about an hour of experimentation with several tricky source materials (the opening battle scene of Star Wars Episode III is an especially good pace-putter-througher), my summative impression was of a unit whose picture personality could be almost infinitely toyed and teased and prodded until everything was just so, and whose sound quality manifestly could not. Indeed if my Chirstmas wishes come true and I am granted both omnipotence and a time machine, then you make take it as read that, after murdering the team of pimply-faced twentysomethings who farted-out the instruction manual, the ability to trim the front channels below zero-dB is the first and perhaps only thing about this player that I would change. Then again, turning down the volume on my Dared DV-6C will also reduce the likelihood that Jim Salk suffers an unexplained, telepathic stroke, so I don't really consider this a major drawback, either. At least not yet. If the audio begins to sound brittle and fatiguing because of the higher levels, we'll only know that later. But it would be a pretty big problem with no fix.
And in This Corner....
As I said before, none of the high-end conventional DVD players I've owned have been without their curious foibles or their curious advantages. The Sonys took the cake on functionality by a factor too large to mention, mostly on account of one simple little thing that they do so much better than everyone else that it serves as a constant source of amazement to me that nobody has copied them: stored break-points. On a Sony-ES machine, one can remove the DVD from the player, place it back in a few days later -- even after having viewed other material -- and the machine will remember and resume playback at the precise moment where you stopped viewing the program. No other machine I've yet owned, including the Denon, can do this. They all store a break-point, but only if I don't open the tray. The instant I do, it's gone.
Curiously, the Sony is also the standard-bearer in backup compatibility -- a fact that would surprise anyone who's ever read ten sentences about Sony's relentless campaign to make it impossible for any of us to enjoy our source material, as a result of its shamelessly fascistic pursuit of an ever more-restrictive set of copy protection protocols, collectively called the DRM. By some bizarre logic, the same company that produces media I can't take with me anywhere, also produces the machines that will play any grunge-copied backup of some one-dollar Malaysian ripoff, without so much as hesitating at the dual layer-break. No other machines I've owned have come close in either of these two columns of the checklist.
But the Sonys, as previously mentioned, are harsh. They produce a harsh picture and, though the 9100 is better than the 3100 in this second regard, they both produce a harsh sound, as well. Some of this, it should be said, may be the result of a lack of double-blindness on the part of your intrepid reviewer: Sony products have to me *always* had an over-detaily, unsubtle, brittle feel to them, ranging from their at-the-time almost garishly crisp triniton line of TVs, to the TA series of audio separates, and back to their current generation of scalding-hot flat screens, I've always had the feeling that Sony's output philosophy was, if not too cute for its own good, then certainly too heavy-handed-technical, evoking recollections of the steak that Jeff Goldbloom ran through his teleporter in the 80s remake of The Fly: Everything's there except the only thing that matters, somehow. Yes, I've liked every single Sony product I've ever owned. But I've loved a grand-total of zero of them.
Worse, the mysterious problem I continue to have with my home electricity led to a bizarre side-effect in the Sony machines that has never reproduced itself with another machine in my house, or with either of my Sony's in their new homes. Periodically, and always at the same moments in the program material being played, the Sony's would issue this extremely shrill high-frequency "bang," a sort of CD-skip-on-steroids, leaving me to sit bolt upright for the next several minutes, waiting for the first symptoms of tweeter damage to manifest in my Songtowers. When this happened not just with personal backups but with retail copies of movies, I knew that the problem with the Sonys was serious and impossible to fix for as long as my house was doing whatever it does to everything I bring in here, and got rid of them. Neither unit has ever made the "bang" in its new home -- one of which is just a few blocks away.
The Marantz DV-7001, bless its heart, was fated to last less than a week -- either because of whatever is wrong here on Saturn-3, or because the particular used specimen I bought through Audiogon was defective from the get-go. At all events, the picture would work fine for about fifteen minutes at a time, then go completely black, and then, when it returned, would be all different shades of pink. Mind you, this player among all of them was the lone candidate for a suitable CD-audio-playback deck, richer and less textured than my beloved Arcam CD-23 but also (wait for it) more musical. But under such sub-optimal circumstances I don't think it would be fair to comment about the Marantz in further detail. Except perhaps to observe that this isn't the first time I've bought something with the Marantz logo and had it cease to function properly after a notably short period of time. Again, we might blame this on the house. We might not. I am increasingly resigned to the fact that we will probably never know.
Oppo certainly has a lot of friends in the amateur review literature, and it deserves them. After a nasty experience getting my 980H to play *any* of my personal backups without a bizarre and totally unacceptable herky-jerk, I wrote a scathing review of the experience and, *after* I'd done so, the company offered to buy the unit back from me for the full price that I had paid -- this despite the fact that I hadn't purchased it from them in the first place. They were classy about everything, and in hindsight it shames me that I tacked so hard-negative about my initial experiences with a scrappy little company that's doing a heck of a job competing with the big boys.
On retail DVD's, the tiny little Oppo clearly and easily stole the show, striking an improbably unceremonious balance between the razor-edged defiles of the Sony and the no-hurry-to-get-there Denon and Marantz. All of that being said, the initial experience doesn't disappear just because someone at the company was nice about getting you out of its consequences. If you own a lot of personal backups, and unless something big has changed in the three years since I owned an Oppo, you probably want to look elsewhere.
Which brings us to the Pioneer, a surprisingly terrific all-around unit from a company I haven't been able to take seriously since the first time I was invited over to a fellow high-school kid's room to listen to his rack system. Everything the DV-79 does, it does well, and that's not a small assortment of things. It's an adequate if not thrilling music machine; its access-speed and menu functionality are both well above average; it puts out a great and easily adjustable picture.
The problem I had with the Pioneer is that, while it does a lot of things well, it doesn't do any one thing better than the other machines I've tried. Its sound is great, but not as good as the Marantz. Its picture is great, but not as good as the Oppo. It plays personal backups better than the Oppo, but not as well as the Sony. And -- here's the thing -- the Denon, at least to me, at least so far, is slightly to significantly better in every single category, with the possible exception of access and menu times that, as I've said, I don't really care about, anyway.
So, Wait: You're Keeping the Denon?
In a word, yes.
The wildcard left un-discussed in all of this wasted bandwidth is that the DVD-player I use in my home entertainment system has to be grimly, almost preternaturally reliable, so as to spare me the cackling derision of the set of asshole friends I keep foolishly inviting over. Something stops working in the ordinary rig, the owner gets up from his chair and figures it out, no harm, no foul. Something stops working in my rig, I am savaged about it for *months*.
Well, if initial-but-still-scientific impressions are anything to go by, not even the Sonys measure-up to the Denon in this regard. My long first night of experimenting with this machine (once I could get it to work at all, ahem, ahem), was characterized by a stout, take-all-comer's vibe from the thing. In all the discs I tried, from all the sources, I couldn't get the Denon to skip, choke on a layer-break, *or* display any house-specific behavioral anomalies such as bangs or skips or (thank God) all-pink screens.
Might it be possible that this rush of satisfaction is attributable to the fact that, of all the players listed here, the Denon is the only one I purchased brand-new and received in a sealed box? Yes. Of course it is. And this admission, coming as it does at the very end of such a long and turgid write-up, must surely be taken into front-line consideration by anyone considering the purchase of one or more of these devices. Thing is, it's also the one attribute of this entire experience that I cannot go back in time and control. If I could, I'd probably start with buying a different house.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
System:
Denon DVD-2930ci DVD player (reviewed)
Arcam CD-23 CD-player
Dared DV-6C multichannel tube-hybrid integrated amplifier (review forthcoming)
Panasonic TH50PX60U plasma television (720p)
Salk Songtower QWT's, front left and right
Linn Trikan center channel
Totem Mite-T surrounds
Element Cable speaker wire
Control Audio CTRL-1 RF-shield-grounded interconnects
Signal Cable AC cords
DaleTech MI-1500 isolation transformer (for the amp)
AudioCircle DIY "Felix" common-mode choke (for the sources)
APC H-15 AC-line conditioner (for the TV)
Dedicated AC-line
Source Material:
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
No Country for Old Men
OldBoy
The Return
Night On Earth Click Here to Read More...
I needed to say this right up-front today because it goes a long way to explaining how I ever got to meet the Denon DVD-2930ci in the first place: Were it not for this weird problem with my electricity (whatever it is), I'd still be the proudly contented owner of a Sony NS3100-ES that is now chugging away in the home of a close friend without incident. I would almost certainly still be the proudly contented owner of its bigger brother, the NS9100-ES -- had the same bizarre issue not compromised its performance in precisely the same way. As high-end machines for the enjoyment of conventional DVD's go, the Sonys are improbably hard to beat in nearly every respect. They do some things very well and other things better than any other player I've ever owned. But here's the thing: all the DVD-players I've ever owned, do at least some things better than any other player I've ever owned, and all of them have either immediately or eventually exhibited nagging issues that "forced" me into trying something else.
This, I believe, leaves me in an unusually advantageous position to comment on each one -- as if someone were telling you about his current tube amplifier after having worked his way through... well, all the others. The Denon DVD-2930ci, then, is the conventional DVD-player I review here because, after brief stops at Sony (the aforementioned 3100 and 9100, sequentially), Oppo (the 980H), Marantz (the DV-7001) and Pioneer (the DV-79 Avi), the Denon is the machine that I have "ended up with." At least until my house eats it.
Thinking Out of the Box
I bought my unit new-in-the-carton from an Ebay seller and straight away I was impressed with its compact, weighty build philosophy. The front faceplate is understated without being severe; the remote is thick and heavy and thoughtfully arrayed; the profile of the machine is low without going all the way to that awkwardly self-conscious, credit-cardy slim that seems to be so popular with so many vendors these days, but which always leaves me feeling like best practices are being sacrificed for trendy cosmetics that are sure to look as dated and silly ten years from now as the high-gloss silver chasses of the mid-seventies.Rear-apron connectivity includes the predictable HDMI, optical and coaxial digital, and legacy video outputs, as well as both two- and five-channel analog audio ports -- the last of which is an absolute necessity in my rig, powered as it is by a discrete analog multichannel tube-integrated amp (the arrestingly good Dared DV-6C, about which much more anon). Connection was straightforward, though the needlessly close placement of the six multichannel audio sockets left me with the customary anxiety about having compromised the circuit integrity of the piece before I even got to play with it.
There is actually no really good reason for these sockets to be as close together as they tend to be on the rear aprons of home entertainment equipment: If you've had as many top covers off as I have, then you know that on the inboard side of these connections the circuits for each channel disperse to all corners of the board. Why, then, do I always have to wonder if my thicker-by-design RCA hozzles are cracking the shells of the interconnect hubs before I've even heard the first note of sound through each new machine? (I warn you not to respond casually: If you can answer that one, I'll next be asking you why control-W, which can easily be typed instead of shift-W, is the signal to my computer to discard fourteen pages of unsaved typing by closing my active fucking browser window. I digress.)Life in Hell. Complete with Owners' Manual.
After connection, of course, the next step was to power-up the machine and put both myself and it through the aggrieved gauntlet of initial setup menus -- aided as usual by a badly written and needlessly over-stylized owners' manual. After the standard, excruciating preliminaries about what a power cord looks like and where to put the batteries in the remote control, the next four pages -- labeled "Making the initial settings" -- proved, on lengthy further review, to be nothing more than a fussy sub-table of contents (e.g., "HDMI Audio Setup: HDMI Speaker Setup: Channel Level: Test Tone: Front LCH: 19").
As ever in this maddening contemporary world of if-you-mind-this-happening-then-you-must-be-the-Unabomber, a simple and inexpensive beta-test of the usefulness and understandability of the manual would've saved me a far larger dose of frustration on the customer end of the bargain. Then again, I would seem to be the only person to have noticed that our most frequently-used piece of consumer electronics is also the one we can't try before we buy it, and once we do buy it we can't get rid of for two whole years at a time -- so I suppose when it comes to consumer advocacy I've got bigger fish to fry than clamoring for an occasional double-blind experiment to see if anybody can read their owners' manuals. Point being, of all the bad owners' manuals out there, the Denon DVD-2930ci's was one of the worst -- surpassed only in its technocratic inscrutability by that of the Sony's, and surpassed in pointlessly fussy layout by... well, nobody's, really.
Much ado about nothing? Yeah, you'd think so, wouldn't ya. So did I. It was only after I thought I'd completed the lengthy setup process that I realized that this particular frustration, in this particular instance, was anything but academic. Indeed the frustration I had with this particular manual would in the end very, very, very nearly result in my having to box the entire unit up and resell it:
The trouble began with the fact that, for reasons apparent only to the manufacturer, the Denon DVD-2930ci is shipped from the factory with the HDMI output completely disabled. This means that spending half an hour on your hands-and-knees, hooking everything up the way you have a half-dozen times before, will reward you with a rich, sprawling, fifty-inch-diagonal plasma screen of nuthin'. To turn on the HDMI output, it happens, you must re-read the entire manual twice -- once to verify that you haven't missed a conspicuous step on account of your own haste, and a second time to find, in four-point type, the words "Upon Purchase" next to the place on page twenty-nine where the manual describes how to toggle-off the only video output that anybody on the planet ever uses. Then, just to make an evening of it, you have to reason-out that "Upon Purchase" means that this setting is the factory default. As for just what was so terribly deficient about the term "factory default," or why it would occur to anyone, anywhere, that defaulting an upconverting DVD-player to output video that isn't upconverted, I won't presume to ask.
Moreover, the act of toggling the HDMI output to the common-sense "on" position isn't even available, after having invested all this time and frustration into discovering the problem there. Instead the user must choose between "HDMI-YCbCr" and "HDMI-RGB," a distinction that not only doesn't serve any technical necessity, but which I for one can't really seem to accept as factually possible. Correct me if I'm wrong about this, do, but it seems to me that component is component, RGB is RGB, and HDMI is -- well, HDMI. Not only have I never seen a user-option that would conflate two of these three formats together into some freakish human-centipede-wannabe like this, I don't actually get how such a selection is even supposed to be practicable, let alone decided-upon by the user.
The manual, of course, says absolutely nothing informative about the decision, but in this case at least the folks at Denon are in good company: All owners' manuals are bad these days, and all DVD-player manuals are bad in this very peculiar way. They all manage to take four pages explaining how to use patch cords to hook the thing to a TV and an amp, and ZERO pages explaining what the results would be if I toggle some third-level-sub-menu setting between "Linear-PCM" and "96kHz Direct," or some other inscrutable but ominously important-sounding gibberish. As is always the case, I ended up skipping the first eleven pages of the manual and then guessing about the only video-related setting that could even hypothetically make any difference. And there's no excuse for that, either.
Life in Hell. Complete with Owners' Manual. Part II.
If this had been where the Denon's setup hassle ended, the shame of this preposterous set of inside-baseball decisions on the design table would've redounded to the company's shame for a very long time indeed. But regrettably my colorful evening of grappling with this machine's frightfully bad user interfaces was only just beginning, as I noticed immediately when I started playing the first DVD and realized that I didn't have multichannel sound.
It happens that if you connect the DVD-2930ci via the multichannel analog audio outputs, and then slavishly follow every single step in the owners' manual for making this connection work, not only isn't there any sound output from the center and surround sockets, but the setup menus don't even allow the user to skate to the appropriate sub-page to fix the problem! Instead, when the user finds the option to adjust multichannel sound output, he attempts to scroll to that choice and discovers that it is "grey'ed": the remote just skates completely over the entire sub-menu and directly to a lower option called "compression." (Since that's something we all need more of in our audio these days, apparently. You know, I was just thinking that what I'd been really missing in my DVD sound, is more compression.)
It went on this way for the better part of two hours: I, in increasingly profane exasperation, consulting the manual again and again, then skating over the only sub-menu I wanted; the machine stoically responding with still more, non-downmixed, two-channel sound. For the length of a feature presentation, I tried switching and un-switching every other setting I could think of, then went back to the manual and re-read the same eleven passages for the eleventh time, then cursed loudly enough for the neighbors to cover their childrens' ears, then started all over again.
Finally, as a last resort before boxing the whole thing up and getting rid of it, I retreated to the friendly confines of the internet discussion fora -- there to discover that the exact-same problem had been exasperating a veritable can-can line of other would-be happy customers, over and over and over again, dating across the entire four-year history of this product's existence. And the thing is, some of their posts were completely un-responded, meaning they'd either figured out the solution on their own, or spent the entire period of time between then and now without analog mulitchannel sound from their analog-multichannel-capable DVD-player. Products in my particular household have been thrown against walls and stomped up and down on, for less.
It turns out that, *after* having (1) toggled the HDMI audio off, (2) toggled the sound from two-channel virtual surround to discrete multichannel, and (3) selected "direct" mode to disable the digital sound-output circuitry altogether, the customer must *THEN* switch the HDMI sound output (which has, you understand, already been utterly de-activated in three different ways, on three different setup screens) from multichannel to two-channel. You read that right, folks: Your completely dead HDMI sound signal has to be two-channel in order for your only live sound signal to be anything else, with this machine.
There is, I perhaps don't have to say, absolutely, no, reason, for this much trouble. If the analog output sockets were active by factory default, it wouldn't hurt a thing in the digital domain. And even if it did, toggling the HDMI sound to the off position (even once, much less three times), should surely be enough of an indication that the user expects to hear something through the analog connections.
More to the point, the owners' manual says *N*O*T*H*I*N*G* about this. I had to find out for myself, more-or-less completely by accident, by reading a dozen blind threads on different discussion boards until at last finding the solution, authored by someone else who discovered it completely by accident. But really, I shouldn't complain this much: After all, it had only taken me a total of four hours of slowly unraveling consumer satisfaction before I found a piece of information that could have appeared in boldface capital letters on the same page as the multichannel connection diagram. How silly of me to complain.
Impressions (Upon Emerging from Hell).
When I'd finally calmed down enough to actually play with it, the Denon DVD-2930ci exhibited several other interesting -- if less maddening -- quirks of personality that in total make it by far the most distinctive of the various models I've tried, from disc access to menus to picture to sound.
The spin-up time and time-to-menu-access of this machine are both noticeably unhurried (this, you understand, coming from a past and satisfied owner of the notoriously lethargic Sonys). On more than one occasion I inadvertently canceled my own instructions to the machine by hitting the same button twice on the remote, thinking I'd missed the infrared bulls' eye the first time. If the amateur review literature is any indication this bothers people far less easily agitated than myself, but my personal ace-in-the-hole in this instance is that, unlike most of the other things I've ranted on about in this cranky little trope, I don't actually give a shit about slow menu-access times. I've had such bad luck, on so many other fronts, that these days I'm pleasantly surprised when my disc media spins-up and plays *at* *all*. Indeed, pretentious as it may sound, I'm actually inclined to derive a certain vicarious, upper-crusty satisfaction from the wait -- as though seated in an expensive restaurant and in no hurry for the waiter to finish pouring the taste-sample of that Sauvignon Blanc he's just recommended. Still it should be said that long wait-times are frustrating for many would-be customers of this product, and I'd have to count myself among them if the wait were any longer than it is.
The HDMI video output, which I tried first at 720p YCrCb and then toggled to 720p RGB just to be sure, was surprisingly laid-back, almost muted-looking. For this, though, I had a fun and easy solution: I've always used the "cinema" presets on my Panasonic TH50 plasma, designed to suffuse the image in that faint hint of gauzy, cellulosy blush we've instinctually come to expect from our movie-going experience. But with past machines this effort has, unbeknownst to me, been actively canceled by those other players' tenacious insistence on bludgeoning every last black pixel until it has bled its last drop of black into the outlines of the figures on the screen.
The Sonys were particularly noteworthy in this regard: With the Panasonic set at all-neutral, the picture output from the 9100 was edgy-sharp to the point of being nerve-wracking; with the 3100 it was almost comically so. The Denon, it would seem, opts for a much quieter output philosophy -- the difference being analogous in some ways to that of the hyper-fidelity of every last microphonic detail emanating from McCormack or Linn or Bryston audio gear, on the one hand, vs. the more "musical" disposition of, let us say, Naim or YBA or McIntosh.
Had I not nulled-out the TV settings I would not have preferred the Denon's picture. But I did, and so I do. With the TV set at +13 sharpness (on a scale of -30 to +30), and +15 for picture (on the same scale), I found that the Denon could play nice on the tiniest details and still not distract me with that fatiguing, look-ma-no-hands vibe I'd always gotten from other high-end conventional DVD players.
The brightness, I should also mention, I left set at a jaw-droppingly-low minus-7. That's because this is the one and most-important trick to getting the most out of one's home-entertainment system: The factory-default brightness settings on TV's are preposterously too high, the better to compensate for the possibility that any one specimen ends up the floor-model in a seizure-inducingly over-lit retail showroom. Turn your brightness down as low as you can without having to strain to see the images in a day-for-night movie scene, and in the long-run your improvement in satisfaction will outstrip all but the most expensive of electronic upgrades. Everything about a home theater looks and feels better when the blacks are black.
What is the Frequency, Kenneth?
The counter-point to all this rosy, laid-back picture quality turns out to be the sound, which is as forward and intense as I'd be personally be able to tolerate. Adjusting the trim levels helped a little, but the catch here is that, as with several other players in its class, it is not possible to adjust the Front-Left and Front-Right trim below zero dB, so the only other choice is to over-rev the center- and surround channels and then turn the whole thing down at the amp -- yet another pointless design oversight that can easily (indeed almost has to) lead to distortion on particularly complex passages, especially when someone in the center of the frame is shouting over something noisy happening off to one side.
After about an hour of experimentation with several tricky source materials (the opening battle scene of Star Wars Episode III is an especially good pace-putter-througher), my summative impression was of a unit whose picture personality could be almost infinitely toyed and teased and prodded until everything was just so, and whose sound quality manifestly could not. Indeed if my Chirstmas wishes come true and I am granted both omnipotence and a time machine, then you make take it as read that, after murdering the team of pimply-faced twentysomethings who farted-out the instruction manual, the ability to trim the front channels below zero-dB is the first and perhaps only thing about this player that I would change. Then again, turning down the volume on my Dared DV-6C will also reduce the likelihood that Jim Salk suffers an unexplained, telepathic stroke, so I don't really consider this a major drawback, either. At least not yet. If the audio begins to sound brittle and fatiguing because of the higher levels, we'll only know that later. But it would be a pretty big problem with no fix.
And in This Corner....
As I said before, none of the high-end conventional DVD players I've owned have been without their curious foibles or their curious advantages. The Sonys took the cake on functionality by a factor too large to mention, mostly on account of one simple little thing that they do so much better than everyone else that it serves as a constant source of amazement to me that nobody has copied them: stored break-points. On a Sony-ES machine, one can remove the DVD from the player, place it back in a few days later -- even after having viewed other material -- and the machine will remember and resume playback at the precise moment where you stopped viewing the program. No other machine I've yet owned, including the Denon, can do this. They all store a break-point, but only if I don't open the tray. The instant I do, it's gone.
Curiously, the Sony is also the standard-bearer in backup compatibility -- a fact that would surprise anyone who's ever read ten sentences about Sony's relentless campaign to make it impossible for any of us to enjoy our source material, as a result of its shamelessly fascistic pursuit of an ever more-restrictive set of copy protection protocols, collectively called the DRM. By some bizarre logic, the same company that produces media I can't take with me anywhere, also produces the machines that will play any grunge-copied backup of some one-dollar Malaysian ripoff, without so much as hesitating at the dual layer-break. No other machines I've owned have come close in either of these two columns of the checklist.
But the Sonys, as previously mentioned, are harsh. They produce a harsh picture and, though the 9100 is better than the 3100 in this second regard, they both produce a harsh sound, as well. Some of this, it should be said, may be the result of a lack of double-blindness on the part of your intrepid reviewer: Sony products have to me *always* had an over-detaily, unsubtle, brittle feel to them, ranging from their at-the-time almost garishly crisp triniton line of TVs, to the TA series of audio separates, and back to their current generation of scalding-hot flat screens, I've always had the feeling that Sony's output philosophy was, if not too cute for its own good, then certainly too heavy-handed-technical, evoking recollections of the steak that Jeff Goldbloom ran through his teleporter in the 80s remake of The Fly: Everything's there except the only thing that matters, somehow. Yes, I've liked every single Sony product I've ever owned. But I've loved a grand-total of zero of them.
Worse, the mysterious problem I continue to have with my home electricity led to a bizarre side-effect in the Sony machines that has never reproduced itself with another machine in my house, or with either of my Sony's in their new homes. Periodically, and always at the same moments in the program material being played, the Sony's would issue this extremely shrill high-frequency "bang," a sort of CD-skip-on-steroids, leaving me to sit bolt upright for the next several minutes, waiting for the first symptoms of tweeter damage to manifest in my Songtowers. When this happened not just with personal backups but with retail copies of movies, I knew that the problem with the Sonys was serious and impossible to fix for as long as my house was doing whatever it does to everything I bring in here, and got rid of them. Neither unit has ever made the "bang" in its new home -- one of which is just a few blocks away.
The Marantz DV-7001, bless its heart, was fated to last less than a week -- either because of whatever is wrong here on Saturn-3, or because the particular used specimen I bought through Audiogon was defective from the get-go. At all events, the picture would work fine for about fifteen minutes at a time, then go completely black, and then, when it returned, would be all different shades of pink. Mind you, this player among all of them was the lone candidate for a suitable CD-audio-playback deck, richer and less textured than my beloved Arcam CD-23 but also (wait for it) more musical. But under such sub-optimal circumstances I don't think it would be fair to comment about the Marantz in further detail. Except perhaps to observe that this isn't the first time I've bought something with the Marantz logo and had it cease to function properly after a notably short period of time. Again, we might blame this on the house. We might not. I am increasingly resigned to the fact that we will probably never know.
Oppo certainly has a lot of friends in the amateur review literature, and it deserves them. After a nasty experience getting my 980H to play *any* of my personal backups without a bizarre and totally unacceptable herky-jerk, I wrote a scathing review of the experience and, *after* I'd done so, the company offered to buy the unit back from me for the full price that I had paid -- this despite the fact that I hadn't purchased it from them in the first place. They were classy about everything, and in hindsight it shames me that I tacked so hard-negative about my initial experiences with a scrappy little company that's doing a heck of a job competing with the big boys.
On retail DVD's, the tiny little Oppo clearly and easily stole the show, striking an improbably unceremonious balance between the razor-edged defiles of the Sony and the no-hurry-to-get-there Denon and Marantz. All of that being said, the initial experience doesn't disappear just because someone at the company was nice about getting you out of its consequences. If you own a lot of personal backups, and unless something big has changed in the three years since I owned an Oppo, you probably want to look elsewhere.
Which brings us to the Pioneer, a surprisingly terrific all-around unit from a company I haven't been able to take seriously since the first time I was invited over to a fellow high-school kid's room to listen to his rack system. Everything the DV-79 does, it does well, and that's not a small assortment of things. It's an adequate if not thrilling music machine; its access-speed and menu functionality are both well above average; it puts out a great and easily adjustable picture.
The problem I had with the Pioneer is that, while it does a lot of things well, it doesn't do any one thing better than the other machines I've tried. Its sound is great, but not as good as the Marantz. Its picture is great, but not as good as the Oppo. It plays personal backups better than the Oppo, but not as well as the Sony. And -- here's the thing -- the Denon, at least to me, at least so far, is slightly to significantly better in every single category, with the possible exception of access and menu times that, as I've said, I don't really care about, anyway.
So, Wait: You're Keeping the Denon?
In a word, yes.
The wildcard left un-discussed in all of this wasted bandwidth is that the DVD-player I use in my home entertainment system has to be grimly, almost preternaturally reliable, so as to spare me the cackling derision of the set of asshole friends I keep foolishly inviting over. Something stops working in the ordinary rig, the owner gets up from his chair and figures it out, no harm, no foul. Something stops working in my rig, I am savaged about it for *months*.
Well, if initial-but-still-scientific impressions are anything to go by, not even the Sonys measure-up to the Denon in this regard. My long first night of experimenting with this machine (once I could get it to work at all, ahem, ahem), was characterized by a stout, take-all-comer's vibe from the thing. In all the discs I tried, from all the sources, I couldn't get the Denon to skip, choke on a layer-break, *or* display any house-specific behavioral anomalies such as bangs or skips or (thank God) all-pink screens.
Might it be possible that this rush of satisfaction is attributable to the fact that, of all the players listed here, the Denon is the only one I purchased brand-new and received in a sealed box? Yes. Of course it is. And this admission, coming as it does at the very end of such a long and turgid write-up, must surely be taken into front-line consideration by anyone considering the purchase of one or more of these devices. Thing is, it's also the one attribute of this entire experience that I cannot go back in time and control. If I could, I'd probably start with buying a different house.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
System:
Denon DVD-2930ci DVD player (reviewed)
Arcam CD-23 CD-player
Dared DV-6C multichannel tube-hybrid integrated amplifier (review forthcoming)
Panasonic TH50PX60U plasma television (720p)
Salk Songtower QWT's, front left and right
Linn Trikan center channel
Totem Mite-T surrounds
Element Cable speaker wire
Control Audio CTRL-1 RF-shield-grounded interconnects
Signal Cable AC cords
DaleTech MI-1500 isolation transformer (for the amp)
AudioCircle DIY "Felix" common-mode choke (for the sources)
APC H-15 AC-line conditioner (for the TV)
Dedicated AC-line
Source Material:
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
No Country for Old Men
OldBoy
The Return
Night On Earth Click Here to Read More...
Monday, December 20, 2010
A Few Minutes About Andy Rooney
Over the past few days I've been engaged in a facebook discussion-thread about the ongoing usefulness (or not) of Andy Rooney and his weekly comment at the conclusion of Sixty Minutes. I of course had my own immediate thoughts on the subject, but the deeper the discussion went the more inclined I was to think a little more carefully, and to that extent a little more comprehensively, about the man, the career, and the present usefulness of both.
To begin with I read his Wikipedia page -- and found it significantly more interesting than Andy Rooney himself typically is, at least lately. Born on January 14th of 1919, he graduated from Colgate and was promptly and summarily drafted in the early summer of 1941, whence he became a correspondent for Stars and Stripes, and, the following year, one of the only six non-combatants to fly in the very first U.S. bombing raid over Germany. He has later admitted that he was in those days opposed to the U.S. involvement in World War Two (as were a lot of other people in the early stages -- most of them ironically Republicans, who used to be full-throated isolationists instead of hypocritically saving their xenophobic bigotry for neighbors a little closer to home).
The compelling bit here is that his view of the war apparently was changed by the sight of a concentration camp -- interesting because the camp in question would have to have been liberated, implying that many of the turgid and jingoistic pieces he'd written about our gallant fighting men would have to have been things he didn't himself believe. That he did it so well is the sort of cornerstone-of-reputation that many writers continue cashing with mediocre nonsense for the entire rest of their lives.
He was hired to work for CBS in 1949. That's not a typo. He's had the same employer -- at least in terms of the principal conduit for his celebrity -- since the early days of the Truman administration. That he thinks of himself primarily as a syndicated columnist and a television personality on the side, serves as a sort of "all-you-need-to-know" comment about the man's personality: proof on a sample of one of his peculiar and yet maddeningly simple formula for success, bringing a no-nonsense tone and diction to what would otherwise be a silly and pointless-sounding denial of anything he himself finds disingenuous or exasperating, from child-proof pill bottles to the nation's preference for weekly television comments over syndicated columns.
It is of course this unique recipe that, in earlier days, earned him such high regard from so many corners of the often fickle and ambiguous vox populi americanus. His "Three Minutes or So With Andy Rooney" was devised in 1978 as a summer break for the then-wildly-popular "Point/Counterpoint" segment that had always run at the end of Sixty Minutes, but Rooney's commentaries became such an instant smash-hit over those three months that he was granted the space on alternating weeks for the following season, and the season after that the network dropped Point/Counterpoint altogether.
In the years since, he has aimed the fire-hose of his withering lack of patience at everything from the burning city of our pointless and ginned-up invasion of Iraq ("Someone, I guess it's President Bush, has to tell us what we're doing there; I don't think any of us know"), to the burning building of scandalously under-engineered car bumpers ("these days car bumpers don't protect anything except the profit margins of automobile parts suppliers"), to the incense candle of the feminine preference for a shoulder bag ("does every woman in the world *really* need a small suitcase to carry around with her wherever she goes?").
My personal favorite segment of all the countless thousands he's done -- and nearly everyone you ask would have one, and nearly everyone's would be different from everyone else's -- was his eulogy for Harry Reasoner, after Reasoner had died of lung cancer. Yes, he waxed choky-hyperbolic: he ran a clip of a previous segment he'd done about the word superstar ("of the four regular correspondents at Sixty Minutes, two are and two aren't"), but the most affecting moment of the piece, and for me of Rooney's entire television career, was when he explained that Reasoner had already had one of his lungs removed from the consequences of smoking, and still could not bring himself to quit. And here, at least, the recipe he used to talk about how this made him feel was something a lot more familiar, at least to those of us who've lost someone close to us from smoking -- anger at the person for not quitting, mixed 2:3 with anger at the cigarette companies for designing a product it would be that impossible to quit.
In the years since, Rooney has committed several important and lasting transgressions against an evolving popular consciousness that he has seemed almost willfully incapable of evolving *with*. His first major kerfuffle came in 1990, when he lumped-in "too many homosexual unions" on a list of over-indulgences that could cause premature death. He was suspended without pay, more-or-less "of course," but the real tragedy for Rooney's legacy, if not his career, is that Sixty Minutes' ratings fell so far and so sharply that the network abruptly ended Rooney's suspension prematurely, thus arming the previously apolitical Rooney with a lack of circumspection about his unique capacity to hurt people with his words.
Since almost the very moment of his quietly sanctimonious reinstatement he has displayed an inability to sense when his own opinions are about to diverge far enough from the common norms of social discourse to cause a problem. In 1994 he complained bitterly that the death of Watergate mastermind and Cambodia-bomber Richard Nixon had somehow been "overshadowed" by the suicide of Nirvana lead-singer Kurt Cobain (even though Cobain's death had done no such thing, and even though, let's face it, it probably *should* have). Since then has mused that depression sufferers might benefit from swapping their copious remaining years of life for his less copious ones, and more recently said, about Major League baseball, "I know Babe Ruth and Lou Gherig; these days all the players seem to be named Rodriguez," the latter an especially difficult car-crash to watch him drive himself into, since this is after all the same man who in 1948 was arrested for sitting at the back of a segregated bus.
So, yes, it's easy to dismiss the man as a sore-headed, homophobic old coot with an enthrallingly comprehensive lack of empathy, precisely because that's what he's become in these last few years -- but he's also just about the only television commentator who went public with a total lack of concern over the Monica Lewinsky affair from the very beginning. He is also one of the few people at CBS who dared to point out that Dan Rather was reading what had been placed in front of him regarding the '04 Bush / National Guard scandal (and to that extent that the persons really responsible for crashing the bogus story had gotten off scot-free). His dispatch of Mel Gibson in re The Passion of the Christ is a pretty big deposit in the bank-of-good-faith, at least to me.
His atheism -- which is supposed to have come to light in 2008 -- has been utterly self-evident to those of us who've been retaining his comments on the subject over the years, dating at least as far back as an interview he did with Tim Russert in the mid-1990s, whereupon Russert asked Rooney what happens when we die and Rooney, without hesitation or fanfare, responded, "nothing." If anything has come to light more recently, it is his total lack of patience for the role of organized religion in polarizing a credulous public, again not without room for admiration on our parts. I guess the point here is that he still has a lot of friends. He deserves them.
All of that being said, he's also about to turn ninety-two years old, and, worse, he is one of a literally dying breed of great men for whom the signature event in their lives rendered them largely unable to put the past in the past and move on. And this, in the end, is the under-exposed angle of this matter: Not knowing who Kurt Cobain is, or why anyone should have wept at the news of his suicide, is if anything a poor barometer on just how out-of-touch a person in his situation can be. The man's not out-of-touch because he doesn't know who Kurt Cobain is; he's out of touch because, given not only his age but his peculiar experiences, he can these days be nothing else.
To try to give this a little perspective, I set out to make a list of all the things that have happened in this world just since Mr. Rooney turned thirty years old, in January of 1949, and which by that measure we might reasonably expect Rooney to think of in some way or other as "new." By the time I was done the list was even longer than this column, but here is just a smattering of the wide galaxy of human events that Rooney is left with no choice other than to think of as mere interrogatives in the broad arc of history.
The first Boeing 747 made its maiden flight when Andy Rooney was already forty-four years old. The first moon-landing happened when he was fifty. When the first Space Shuttle lifted off, Rooney was sixty-one, and when the Challenger exploded, he was sixty-seven. The Hubble Space Telescope was launched when Rooney was seventy-two, and by the time the Columbia disintegrated on reentry, he was eighty-three years old. JFK was shot in Dallas when Andy Rooney was nearing his forty-fifth birthday. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated when Rooney was forty-nine. When the Munich Olympics slayings took place, Rooney was fifty-three. The Jonestown massacre happened when he was fifty-six. Oklahoma City happened when he was seventy-three, and at the time of Columbine he was seventy-nine.
When Elvis Presley played the Ed Sullivan show, Andy Rooney was forty-four years old. Nixon's trip to China happened when Rooney was fifty-three, and the fall of Saigon happened when he was fifty-six. When the Cosby Show debuted, Rooney was sixty-five, and when the first episode of The Simpsons followed-suit, he was already seventy-four. Andy Rooney hasn't just lived, but can no doubt actively recollect, a world without wireless telephones, personal computers, battery-operated radios, imported Japanese cars, and even Interstate Highways. The high-bypass turbofan (jet) engine was perfected for commercial use when Rooney was already thirty-eight years old. When synthetic rubber came along, he was thirty-one. I could, it would seem, go on and on and on.
None of this is automatically to suggest that Rooney should be banished without further cause from his position near the pinnacle of popular comment. Or perhaps it is. Hegemonic rules of thumb, as Mr. Rooney himself knows only too well, have a nettlesome way of being also uncomfortably valid. (This is, after all, how they become hegemony in the first place.) The test then becomes whether the hegemonic rule in question is fair or not. Forcing blacks to sit at the back of a bus is unfair -- so much so that the hegemonic rule merits confrontation by protest, leading to arrest. But easing to the sidelines of opinion leadership a person whose own sense of the contemporary is irretrievably out of date is, alas, not. After all, for contemporary opinion leadership to function in society's best interests, it must first of all be *contemporary*.
This is the reason that Mr. Rooney must now resign or be gently excused from both his syndicated column and his segment at the end of Sixty Minutes -- not because of any particular thing he has said or admitted he fails to appreciate, but for all the things that his years alone prevent him from saying, or appreciating, that the rest of us need to hear from the hegemony-stripping curmudgeons who fill our Sunday evenings with thoughtful tropes about the absurdity of the world around us. When the curmudgeon himself becomes the absurd, it would seem, the spell is broken and the exercise no longer benefits the world being commented upon. And the sad truth that Rooney represents behind his hand-made desk is that years alone are enough to effect that very result.
Dave O'Gorman
"The Key Grip"
Gainesville, Florida. Click Here to Read More...
To begin with I read his Wikipedia page -- and found it significantly more interesting than Andy Rooney himself typically is, at least lately. Born on January 14th of 1919, he graduated from Colgate and was promptly and summarily drafted in the early summer of 1941, whence he became a correspondent for Stars and Stripes, and, the following year, one of the only six non-combatants to fly in the very first U.S. bombing raid over Germany. He has later admitted that he was in those days opposed to the U.S. involvement in World War Two (as were a lot of other people in the early stages -- most of them ironically Republicans, who used to be full-throated isolationists instead of hypocritically saving their xenophobic bigotry for neighbors a little closer to home).
The compelling bit here is that his view of the war apparently was changed by the sight of a concentration camp -- interesting because the camp in question would have to have been liberated, implying that many of the turgid and jingoistic pieces he'd written about our gallant fighting men would have to have been things he didn't himself believe. That he did it so well is the sort of cornerstone-of-reputation that many writers continue cashing with mediocre nonsense for the entire rest of their lives.
He was hired to work for CBS in 1949. That's not a typo. He's had the same employer -- at least in terms of the principal conduit for his celebrity -- since the early days of the Truman administration. That he thinks of himself primarily as a syndicated columnist and a television personality on the side, serves as a sort of "all-you-need-to-know" comment about the man's personality: proof on a sample of one of his peculiar and yet maddeningly simple formula for success, bringing a no-nonsense tone and diction to what would otherwise be a silly and pointless-sounding denial of anything he himself finds disingenuous or exasperating, from child-proof pill bottles to the nation's preference for weekly television comments over syndicated columns.
It is of course this unique recipe that, in earlier days, earned him such high regard from so many corners of the often fickle and ambiguous vox populi americanus. His "Three Minutes or So With Andy Rooney" was devised in 1978 as a summer break for the then-wildly-popular "Point/Counterpoint" segment that had always run at the end of Sixty Minutes, but Rooney's commentaries became such an instant smash-hit over those three months that he was granted the space on alternating weeks for the following season, and the season after that the network dropped Point/Counterpoint altogether.
In the years since, he has aimed the fire-hose of his withering lack of patience at everything from the burning city of our pointless and ginned-up invasion of Iraq ("Someone, I guess it's President Bush, has to tell us what we're doing there; I don't think any of us know"), to the burning building of scandalously under-engineered car bumpers ("these days car bumpers don't protect anything except the profit margins of automobile parts suppliers"), to the incense candle of the feminine preference for a shoulder bag ("does every woman in the world *really* need a small suitcase to carry around with her wherever she goes?").
My personal favorite segment of all the countless thousands he's done -- and nearly everyone you ask would have one, and nearly everyone's would be different from everyone else's -- was his eulogy for Harry Reasoner, after Reasoner had died of lung cancer. Yes, he waxed choky-hyperbolic: he ran a clip of a previous segment he'd done about the word superstar ("of the four regular correspondents at Sixty Minutes, two are and two aren't"), but the most affecting moment of the piece, and for me of Rooney's entire television career, was when he explained that Reasoner had already had one of his lungs removed from the consequences of smoking, and still could not bring himself to quit. And here, at least, the recipe he used to talk about how this made him feel was something a lot more familiar, at least to those of us who've lost someone close to us from smoking -- anger at the person for not quitting, mixed 2:3 with anger at the cigarette companies for designing a product it would be that impossible to quit.
In the years since, Rooney has committed several important and lasting transgressions against an evolving popular consciousness that he has seemed almost willfully incapable of evolving *with*. His first major kerfuffle came in 1990, when he lumped-in "too many homosexual unions" on a list of over-indulgences that could cause premature death. He was suspended without pay, more-or-less "of course," but the real tragedy for Rooney's legacy, if not his career, is that Sixty Minutes' ratings fell so far and so sharply that the network abruptly ended Rooney's suspension prematurely, thus arming the previously apolitical Rooney with a lack of circumspection about his unique capacity to hurt people with his words.
Since almost the very moment of his quietly sanctimonious reinstatement he has displayed an inability to sense when his own opinions are about to diverge far enough from the common norms of social discourse to cause a problem. In 1994 he complained bitterly that the death of Watergate mastermind and Cambodia-bomber Richard Nixon had somehow been "overshadowed" by the suicide of Nirvana lead-singer Kurt Cobain (even though Cobain's death had done no such thing, and even though, let's face it, it probably *should* have). Since then has mused that depression sufferers might benefit from swapping their copious remaining years of life for his less copious ones, and more recently said, about Major League baseball, "I know Babe Ruth and Lou Gherig; these days all the players seem to be named Rodriguez," the latter an especially difficult car-crash to watch him drive himself into, since this is after all the same man who in 1948 was arrested for sitting at the back of a segregated bus.
So, yes, it's easy to dismiss the man as a sore-headed, homophobic old coot with an enthrallingly comprehensive lack of empathy, precisely because that's what he's become in these last few years -- but he's also just about the only television commentator who went public with a total lack of concern over the Monica Lewinsky affair from the very beginning. He is also one of the few people at CBS who dared to point out that Dan Rather was reading what had been placed in front of him regarding the '04 Bush / National Guard scandal (and to that extent that the persons really responsible for crashing the bogus story had gotten off scot-free). His dispatch of Mel Gibson in re The Passion of the Christ is a pretty big deposit in the bank-of-good-faith, at least to me.
His atheism -- which is supposed to have come to light in 2008 -- has been utterly self-evident to those of us who've been retaining his comments on the subject over the years, dating at least as far back as an interview he did with Tim Russert in the mid-1990s, whereupon Russert asked Rooney what happens when we die and Rooney, without hesitation or fanfare, responded, "nothing." If anything has come to light more recently, it is his total lack of patience for the role of organized religion in polarizing a credulous public, again not without room for admiration on our parts. I guess the point here is that he still has a lot of friends. He deserves them.
All of that being said, he's also about to turn ninety-two years old, and, worse, he is one of a literally dying breed of great men for whom the signature event in their lives rendered them largely unable to put the past in the past and move on. And this, in the end, is the under-exposed angle of this matter: Not knowing who Kurt Cobain is, or why anyone should have wept at the news of his suicide, is if anything a poor barometer on just how out-of-touch a person in his situation can be. The man's not out-of-touch because he doesn't know who Kurt Cobain is; he's out of touch because, given not only his age but his peculiar experiences, he can these days be nothing else.
To try to give this a little perspective, I set out to make a list of all the things that have happened in this world just since Mr. Rooney turned thirty years old, in January of 1949, and which by that measure we might reasonably expect Rooney to think of in some way or other as "new." By the time I was done the list was even longer than this column, but here is just a smattering of the wide galaxy of human events that Rooney is left with no choice other than to think of as mere interrogatives in the broad arc of history.
The first Boeing 747 made its maiden flight when Andy Rooney was already forty-four years old. The first moon-landing happened when he was fifty. When the first Space Shuttle lifted off, Rooney was sixty-one, and when the Challenger exploded, he was sixty-seven. The Hubble Space Telescope was launched when Rooney was seventy-two, and by the time the Columbia disintegrated on reentry, he was eighty-three years old. JFK was shot in Dallas when Andy Rooney was nearing his forty-fifth birthday. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated when Rooney was forty-nine. When the Munich Olympics slayings took place, Rooney was fifty-three. The Jonestown massacre happened when he was fifty-six. Oklahoma City happened when he was seventy-three, and at the time of Columbine he was seventy-nine.
When Elvis Presley played the Ed Sullivan show, Andy Rooney was forty-four years old. Nixon's trip to China happened when Rooney was fifty-three, and the fall of Saigon happened when he was fifty-six. When the Cosby Show debuted, Rooney was sixty-five, and when the first episode of The Simpsons followed-suit, he was already seventy-four. Andy Rooney hasn't just lived, but can no doubt actively recollect, a world without wireless telephones, personal computers, battery-operated radios, imported Japanese cars, and even Interstate Highways. The high-bypass turbofan (jet) engine was perfected for commercial use when Rooney was already thirty-eight years old. When synthetic rubber came along, he was thirty-one. I could, it would seem, go on and on and on.
None of this is automatically to suggest that Rooney should be banished without further cause from his position near the pinnacle of popular comment. Or perhaps it is. Hegemonic rules of thumb, as Mr. Rooney himself knows only too well, have a nettlesome way of being also uncomfortably valid. (This is, after all, how they become hegemony in the first place.) The test then becomes whether the hegemonic rule in question is fair or not. Forcing blacks to sit at the back of a bus is unfair -- so much so that the hegemonic rule merits confrontation by protest, leading to arrest. But easing to the sidelines of opinion leadership a person whose own sense of the contemporary is irretrievably out of date is, alas, not. After all, for contemporary opinion leadership to function in society's best interests, it must first of all be *contemporary*.
This is the reason that Mr. Rooney must now resign or be gently excused from both his syndicated column and his segment at the end of Sixty Minutes -- not because of any particular thing he has said or admitted he fails to appreciate, but for all the things that his years alone prevent him from saying, or appreciating, that the rest of us need to hear from the hegemony-stripping curmudgeons who fill our Sunday evenings with thoughtful tropes about the absurdity of the world around us. When the curmudgeon himself becomes the absurd, it would seem, the spell is broken and the exercise no longer benefits the world being commented upon. And the sad truth that Rooney represents behind his hand-made desk is that years alone are enough to effect that very result.
Dave O'Gorman
"The Key Grip"
Gainesville, Florida. Click Here to Read More...
Monday, April 12, 2010
2010 Is Not 1994. Unless it Is.
There's lots of talk these days about some early indications of a coming bloodbath for the Democratic Party in the 2010 midterm elections, and a lot of that talk--somewhat understandably--involves parallels to 1994, when the party lost control of both houses of congress in the aftermath of a contentious battle to reform the health care system in this country. Just as many things are different this time, however: from the dearth of Democratic retirements (at least so far), to the absence of a Somalia-like misstep by the President on the foreign-policy side (at least so far), to the fact of his election by a popular majority of the country--a counter example to what most people don't remember was the original cassus belli the extreme right-wing brought to their hatred of Bill Clinton: In a plurality-take-all system at the state level, he'd comfortably amassed 270+ electoral votes while over six in every ten people were industriously voting for someone else. Not this time.
Most of all, there is the glaring difference that the Democrats this time actually *passed* their health insurance reform effort, and (somewhat less importantly when it comes to electoral strategies, I'm afraid) the bill they passed is a far more politically conservative effort than the one they failed to pass in '94, anyway. Indeed the gist of the thing--increased access to care through the establishment of exchanges, individual mandates, and regulation of the industry's capacity to deny coverage--were also the main talking-points of the counter-proposal to Clintoncare that had been authored by The Heritage Foundation in '93. Having just passed a Heritage Foundation look-alike, then, it would seem unlikely that the Democratic Party could be routed in November of '10 for dragging the country too far to the left. The parallels to '94, as I've been arguing in various political aggregator fora for weeks, simply aren't there. The Democrats should be a in a far, far stronger position than they were in April of 1994. But here's the thing: Because of these differences, they should also be in a far stronger position than they are, too.
There's no point raging at the dying of any light, of course, and raging against one that has been raged against since before I was born by everyone and Will Rogers, is doubly un-productive. But the position in which the Democrats now find themselves is really nothing short of stupefying. Everywhere I look, in fact, I cannot help but feel the uneasy sense that the Democrats are in the process of once again snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
The stimulus bill passed last spring (you remember, the one that was derided as socialist and profligate, yet consisted of over 50% tax cuts?) has begun to work after precisely the sort of time-lag predicted by professional economists, and the methodology behind it has been (once again) validated as a matter of settled paradigmatic fact, negating the willfully counterfactual drivel that has tumbled from the mouths of the Palinites regarding the supposedly ineffectual policies of the New Deal. That bill passed without a single a Republican vote, and now that they've spent a year poking holes in it on fallacious grounds as it continued to quietly do its work (while they dragged the health-care debate out to its maximum duration through Senate filibuster), the Republicans are brazenly now pivoting to a charge that the President has frittered-away time on a contentious health insurance fight instead of--get this!--concentrating on the economy.
The health insurance reform bill itself, meanwhile, does none of the things that were suggested it was going to do by the same people who called it socialist as well. And yet those people keep banging away about it as if they lived in a parallel universe. I recently found myself in a two-weeks-long flame war on Facebook with a friend-of-a-friend who insisted, over and over again, that the parallel to the '93 Heritage Foundation proposal was a delusional fantasy on my part, dismissing link after link as beneath his time to either read or counter-cite, on the basis of this bill's supposedly self-evident inconsistency with the guiding principles over at Heritage. And finally, when I found the link that truly settled the matter, he disappeared. There was no "well, it's not as similar as you make it out to be, Dave," no mealy-mouthed grumblings about how the circumstances were the difference, no faint about how Heritage was hoping their own bill wouldn't pass, or some-such: He just flat-out disappeared. There simply was no comeback. The bill we just got done passing, is, not, a socialist, takeover, of, the, health, care, system. Period. And still, in other venues, they keep at it.
All of this should make for some pretty strong Democratic bargaining leverage with the American people. Nobody likes it when a political movement turns shrill, and people especially don't like it when that negativism is inconsistent with the reality on the ground. Just ask Newt Gingerich, who predicted a sixty-seat Republican majority in the House after the Monica Lewinsky matter, and whose bitter slash-and-burn strategy about a matter that most people honestly didn't care about one way or the other very nearly lost the Republicans their control of the body, and did eventually cost him the Speakership.
So why isn't this 1998 all over again, instead of continuing--alarmingly--to poll like 1994? The equalizing factor is the same one it always is: While Democrats at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue have been making policy and presuming the self-evidence of the lies being told by the other side, what they haven't been doing nearly as good a job of, is MESSAGING.
Tell some of the most incendiary trolls in political news sites that the stimulus was over 50% tax-cuts, and they scream denials back at you... until you post a link that proves it, and then they abruptly vanish for days at a time, and come back wanting to talk about something else. Tell some blow-hard facebook nobody who's used to spitting-out Glenn Beck nonsense that the Heritage Foundation proposed something not unlike what we just passed, and he embarrasses himself insisting that it isn't true until you've blugeoned him with so many references that he finally reads one of them... and abruptly vanishes, too. But in order for this to happen, you have to actually do some of this telling.
The elected Democrats in Washington, it would seem, are in the process of instead making the same mistake they always make when they're in power. They assume that the absurdity of the things being said about them is its own counter-argument, and they don't respond aggressively enough. George McGovern spoke about it not too long ago. The '72 Nixon campaign was saying things about McGovern that were so outrageous that the Democrats feared the charge of "stooping to their level" by responding, and chose not to. As a result of which (with a little bit of help from Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, of course), they got clobbered.
And this, folks, this is the alarming parallel to both 1972 and 1994. There are far too many smart people on the left who are assuming that the passage of the main component of their legislative agenda, and the absence of a plague of locusts descening instantly aftwerward, will serve as a de facto response to the gibberish nonsense still being spewed out by the Republicans. And in this country, as Democrats should know only too well, there is no such thing as a de facto response to gibberish nonsense. If Democrats continue to make the same mistake now that the health insurance reform bill has passed, they're going to have huge swathes of the country going to the polls in November believing that it's a socialist takeover of health-care, even though it already isn't, and they're going to get clobbered by the same boring, lying liars who've done it so many times before.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
Most of all, there is the glaring difference that the Democrats this time actually *passed* their health insurance reform effort, and (somewhat less importantly when it comes to electoral strategies, I'm afraid) the bill they passed is a far more politically conservative effort than the one they failed to pass in '94, anyway. Indeed the gist of the thing--increased access to care through the establishment of exchanges, individual mandates, and regulation of the industry's capacity to deny coverage--were also the main talking-points of the counter-proposal to Clintoncare that had been authored by The Heritage Foundation in '93. Having just passed a Heritage Foundation look-alike, then, it would seem unlikely that the Democratic Party could be routed in November of '10 for dragging the country too far to the left. The parallels to '94, as I've been arguing in various political aggregator fora for weeks, simply aren't there. The Democrats should be a in a far, far stronger position than they were in April of 1994. But here's the thing: Because of these differences, they should also be in a far stronger position than they are, too.
There's no point raging at the dying of any light, of course, and raging against one that has been raged against since before I was born by everyone and Will Rogers, is doubly un-productive. But the position in which the Democrats now find themselves is really nothing short of stupefying. Everywhere I look, in fact, I cannot help but feel the uneasy sense that the Democrats are in the process of once again snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
The stimulus bill passed last spring (you remember, the one that was derided as socialist and profligate, yet consisted of over 50% tax cuts?) has begun to work after precisely the sort of time-lag predicted by professional economists, and the methodology behind it has been (once again) validated as a matter of settled paradigmatic fact, negating the willfully counterfactual drivel that has tumbled from the mouths of the Palinites regarding the supposedly ineffectual policies of the New Deal. That bill passed without a single a Republican vote, and now that they've spent a year poking holes in it on fallacious grounds as it continued to quietly do its work (while they dragged the health-care debate out to its maximum duration through Senate filibuster), the Republicans are brazenly now pivoting to a charge that the President has frittered-away time on a contentious health insurance fight instead of--get this!--concentrating on the economy.
The health insurance reform bill itself, meanwhile, does none of the things that were suggested it was going to do by the same people who called it socialist as well. And yet those people keep banging away about it as if they lived in a parallel universe. I recently found myself in a two-weeks-long flame war on Facebook with a friend-of-a-friend who insisted, over and over again, that the parallel to the '93 Heritage Foundation proposal was a delusional fantasy on my part, dismissing link after link as beneath his time to either read or counter-cite, on the basis of this bill's supposedly self-evident inconsistency with the guiding principles over at Heritage. And finally, when I found the link that truly settled the matter, he disappeared. There was no "well, it's not as similar as you make it out to be, Dave," no mealy-mouthed grumblings about how the circumstances were the difference, no faint about how Heritage was hoping their own bill wouldn't pass, or some-such: He just flat-out disappeared. There simply was no comeback. The bill we just got done passing, is, not, a socialist, takeover, of, the, health, care, system. Period. And still, in other venues, they keep at it.
All of this should make for some pretty strong Democratic bargaining leverage with the American people. Nobody likes it when a political movement turns shrill, and people especially don't like it when that negativism is inconsistent with the reality on the ground. Just ask Newt Gingerich, who predicted a sixty-seat Republican majority in the House after the Monica Lewinsky matter, and whose bitter slash-and-burn strategy about a matter that most people honestly didn't care about one way or the other very nearly lost the Republicans their control of the body, and did eventually cost him the Speakership.
So why isn't this 1998 all over again, instead of continuing--alarmingly--to poll like 1994? The equalizing factor is the same one it always is: While Democrats at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue have been making policy and presuming the self-evidence of the lies being told by the other side, what they haven't been doing nearly as good a job of, is MESSAGING.
Tell some of the most incendiary trolls in political news sites that the stimulus was over 50% tax-cuts, and they scream denials back at you... until you post a link that proves it, and then they abruptly vanish for days at a time, and come back wanting to talk about something else. Tell some blow-hard facebook nobody who's used to spitting-out Glenn Beck nonsense that the Heritage Foundation proposed something not unlike what we just passed, and he embarrasses himself insisting that it isn't true until you've blugeoned him with so many references that he finally reads one of them... and abruptly vanishes, too. But in order for this to happen, you have to actually do some of this telling.
The elected Democrats in Washington, it would seem, are in the process of instead making the same mistake they always make when they're in power. They assume that the absurdity of the things being said about them is its own counter-argument, and they don't respond aggressively enough. George McGovern spoke about it not too long ago. The '72 Nixon campaign was saying things about McGovern that were so outrageous that the Democrats feared the charge of "stooping to their level" by responding, and chose not to. As a result of which (with a little bit of help from Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, of course), they got clobbered.
And this, folks, this is the alarming parallel to both 1972 and 1994. There are far too many smart people on the left who are assuming that the passage of the main component of their legislative agenda, and the absence of a plague of locusts descening instantly aftwerward, will serve as a de facto response to the gibberish nonsense still being spewed out by the Republicans. And in this country, as Democrats should know only too well, there is no such thing as a de facto response to gibberish nonsense. If Democrats continue to make the same mistake now that the health insurance reform bill has passed, they're going to have huge swathes of the country going to the polls in November believing that it's a socialist takeover of health-care, even though it already isn't, and they're going to get clobbered by the same boring, lying liars who've done it so many times before.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
Friday, April 2, 2010
Drunk on Power or Just Drunk?
Alert and loyal reader Bill S. points out that the first sentence of my last post is pretty doggone silly. Next time, maybe one more proof-read?
That's all I've got right now, folks; you've earned the time off.
Click Here to Read More...
That's all I've got right now, folks; you've earned the time off.
Click Here to Read More...
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Oh, Nate, You Know I Love You, But We Have to Talk
I would like to hope to like to think that my rivalry with Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com could be three things that it might today be something closer to zero of, at least the way I've conducted myself so far. I'd like to hope to like to think, specifically, that it could be respectful, jealousy-free, and constructive -- at least to the extent that it might elevate the quality of the work of at least one of us. Indeed it would appear that some of my blog commentators have missed the frequency with which I've said complimentary things about Mr. Silver and his site -- something I've done often. He deserves them.
But the current post on his site, penned under his by-line, is, well, just nutty, frankly.
The article, written by a guy whose credential as a political analyst was secured for all-time by using an elaborate and econometrically rigorous model to correctly predict forty-nine of fifty states in the 2008 Presidential election, argues that there is no proof of the widely savored rumor that the extreme right wing in this country is hurting its own cause by refusing to fill out its census forms. To prove this, Mr. Silver posts the current national average for already-returned forms at the top of a data-table -- about 50%, so far -- and then lists the return rates of all twenty-one states that have voted Republican in the three most recent Presidential elections. Some of these states, as he notes, have higher census return-rates than the national average; others have lower ones.
And then? Then, Mr. Silver -- who, let's face it, is self-evidently a better econometrician with a hangover, a migraine, and a concussion than I'll be on the best day of my life -- does a very, very, very curious thing: he averages the return-rates of all twenty-one of those states, with positively no regard to differences in their populations. And this, folks, this is supposed to be the smoking-gun proof that the red-state-refusal hypothesis is unfounded. To consider just how sloppy a statement this is on his part, one needs to know just which states are being over-represented in his average and which ones are being under-represented, and by how much. The July 2009 estimate for the population of Texas, for example, is 24,782,302. At a 44% response-rate to the census mailing, Texas is lagging 6% behind the national average -- considerably more than the population of an entire congressional district in this country, indeed closer to two district's worth. Arizona, meanwhile, was estimated in 2008 to have a population of 6,500,000 people, and is running at 48%, which means it's currently shorting itself by 130,000, which may not be a full congressional district's worth of people yet, but still ain't chicken-feed. Georgia, with a population estimate of 9,829,291 in July of 2009, is running 5% behind the national average, shorting itself 491,464 people, which happens to be inching right up to being as much as the entire population of Wyoming, which gets equally-weighted credit in Mr. Silver's analysis for being 3% ahead, as Georgia does for being as far behind as Wyoming's projected total.
In all Mr. Silver's analysis shows that the red states are actually running behind by a total of almost 1,500,000 people -- or roughly the entire populations of North and South Dakota put together.
And the thing is, folks, this is just a current "tally," it isn't even extrapolated to the mail-deadline.
Listen, I allowed a little too much personal envy of to cloud my discourse on the subject of what the very smart people over at FiveThirtyEight are accomplishing with their site -- especially when one considers that, first, it isn't a zero-sum game, and, second, even if it were, it can't be won by someone who takes a year off from playing -- and I got deservedly spanked for it. Mr. Silver and his team did a positively superlative job of covering the shocking absence of a McCain ground offensive during the 2008 campaign: it was a Peabody-worthy effort on their part, in the highest, grandest traditions of gumshoe journalism. Since then his coverage of the political strategies behind health insurance reform have been consistently incisive, often witty, and sometimes poignantly predictive of the drama's next chapter. He's a great writer, and a great economist. A pro in a world of hack amateurs, doing a peerless job of trying to keep the fractious liberal blogosphere on-task.
...But in an era in which every single statement of fact is carefully scrutinized by the (factless) other side for even the slightest hint of book-cooking, the fellow among us whose angle is nailing-down the numbers simply must be held to a higher standard than this most recent article. He knows better.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida.
Click Here to Read More...
But the current post on his site, penned under his by-line, is, well, just nutty, frankly.
The article, written by a guy whose credential as a political analyst was secured for all-time by using an elaborate and econometrically rigorous model to correctly predict forty-nine of fifty states in the 2008 Presidential election, argues that there is no proof of the widely savored rumor that the extreme right wing in this country is hurting its own cause by refusing to fill out its census forms. To prove this, Mr. Silver posts the current national average for already-returned forms at the top of a data-table -- about 50%, so far -- and then lists the return rates of all twenty-one states that have voted Republican in the three most recent Presidential elections. Some of these states, as he notes, have higher census return-rates than the national average; others have lower ones.
And then? Then, Mr. Silver -- who, let's face it, is self-evidently a better econometrician with a hangover, a migraine, and a concussion than I'll be on the best day of my life -- does a very, very, very curious thing: he averages the return-rates of all twenty-one of those states, with positively no regard to differences in their populations. And this, folks, this is supposed to be the smoking-gun proof that the red-state-refusal hypothesis is unfounded. To consider just how sloppy a statement this is on his part, one needs to know just which states are being over-represented in his average and which ones are being under-represented, and by how much. The July 2009 estimate for the population of Texas, for example, is 24,782,302. At a 44% response-rate to the census mailing, Texas is lagging 6% behind the national average -- considerably more than the population of an entire congressional district in this country, indeed closer to two district's worth. Arizona, meanwhile, was estimated in 2008 to have a population of 6,500,000 people, and is running at 48%, which means it's currently shorting itself by 130,000, which may not be a full congressional district's worth of people yet, but still ain't chicken-feed. Georgia, with a population estimate of 9,829,291 in July of 2009, is running 5% behind the national average, shorting itself 491,464 people, which happens to be inching right up to being as much as the entire population of Wyoming, which gets equally-weighted credit in Mr. Silver's analysis for being 3% ahead, as Georgia does for being as far behind as Wyoming's projected total.
In all Mr. Silver's analysis shows that the red states are actually running behind by a total of almost 1,500,000 people -- or roughly the entire populations of North and South Dakota put together.
And the thing is, folks, this is just a current "tally," it isn't even extrapolated to the mail-deadline.
Listen, I allowed a little too much personal envy of to cloud my discourse on the subject of what the very smart people over at FiveThirtyEight are accomplishing with their site -- especially when one considers that, first, it isn't a zero-sum game, and, second, even if it were, it can't be won by someone who takes a year off from playing -- and I got deservedly spanked for it. Mr. Silver and his team did a positively superlative job of covering the shocking absence of a McCain ground offensive during the 2008 campaign: it was a Peabody-worthy effort on their part, in the highest, grandest traditions of gumshoe journalism. Since then his coverage of the political strategies behind health insurance reform have been consistently incisive, often witty, and sometimes poignantly predictive of the drama's next chapter. He's a great writer, and a great economist. A pro in a world of hack amateurs, doing a peerless job of trying to keep the fractious liberal blogosphere on-task.
...But in an era in which every single statement of fact is carefully scrutinized by the (factless) other side for even the slightest hint of book-cooking, the fellow among us whose angle is nailing-down the numbers simply must be held to a higher standard than this most recent article. He knows better.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida.
Click Here to Read More...
Sunday, March 28, 2010
The Even Bigger Republican Suicide to Come?
A veritable mountain of mostly bizarre political news has transpired across this great country of ours in the year since my last political commentary. From the arresting spectacle of Sarah Palin's dazzlingly incoherent resignation speech, on the occasion of her inexplicable departure from the Alaska Governor's office, to the openly infuriating spectacle of a pro-life, pro-gun Senator from Montana placing himself in charge of framing the debate about health care reform. And though I've been as busy as ever with competing demands on my time, I'd be lying if I said that the reason for my silence through all of this was any more complicated than the absence of enough heart to face it all, in print.
Much of this past year I spent personally expecting the Obama Administration to finally abandon its efforts to pass a major health care bill, and then to reap the consequences of same at the polling stations in 2010 and, perhaps, even 2012. All of that is over now, thanks to three indefatigably persistent individuals -- without any of whose efforts the health insurance reform just passed would still be flopping its dorsal fins on a committee-room table in the bowels of the Senate somewhere. Perfect sense, really: A tough legislative effort with broad scope and sweeping consequences, teeters on the brink of dying a dozen times over, and is ultimately dragged across the finish line thanks to the dogged efforts of a tiny handful of people. Except for one small problem: The three people deserving of all the credit, in this instance, are Scott Brown, Jim Bunning, and Jim DeMint -- all of them, of course, Republicans.
Scott Brown.
The man who was told he had no chance whatsoever to rise from his lowly status as a first-term Massachusetts state senator and seize the United States Senate seat left vacant by the heartrendingly poignant passing of Ted Kennedy (on the very precipice of seeing his own lifelong dream finally fulfilled), ignored all the pundits who told him the state would never give Teddy's seat to a Republican, ignored all the fractious in-fighting attendant to a chronically minority party in a party-machine state, ignored the polls that showed him, at one juncture, over thirty points down to the Democratic nominee (state Attorney General Martha What-The-Christ-Was-Her-Name-Again-I've-Already-Forgotten), and, thanks to a season of Republican fear-mongering about the Democrats' sixty-seat majority and what they were doing with it, plus a few strategically placed gaffes on the part of Ms. Already-Forgotten, came from almost literally out of nowhere, and won -- bringing the always more-cohesive and message-disciplined Republicans to the crucial threshold of 41 seats, in the Senate.
Giddy with the delight of the legislative implications for this stunning upset, noted political columnists from the right-wing began openly chuckling, if not actually thumping their chests. On January 20th Fred Barnes wrote a piece for the Weekly Standard entitled, "The Health Care Bill is Dead." Toward the end of the piece, he wrote, "The health care bill, ObamaCare, is dead with not the slightest prospect of resurrection. Brown ran to be the 41st vote for filibuster and now he is just that. Democrats have talked up clever strategies to pass the bill in the Senate despite Brown, but they won’t fly."
Quite aside from the fact of Mr. Barnes' amusing inability to hyphenate compound verbs like "talked-up," there is the odd dissonance of Mr. Barnes having predicted the demise of something that had already passed both chambers of Congress -- albeit in very slightly different forms. Far from dead, in fact, the bill had received in Scott Brown's victory precisely the kind of this-or-nothing exigency without which it had been paper-cut to pieces by the gun-nut-Democrats on the center right, and the (equally wrong, by the way) FireDogLake crowd, on the extreme left. Brown's victory, and Mr. Barnes should have been comfortably smart enough to realize this, empowered Nancy Pelosi to go to her fractious left-flank and say, with unquestionable credibility, "If you don't vote for the Senate's admittedly more conservative version of the bill, there will be no bill."
Lacking such leverage on her part, we would still be talking about pushed-back deadlines for Mr. Obama's trip to Asia. The first round of thank you's, then, go to Scott Brown, for helping us get this deal done by changing the optics of the bill's end-game in a direction that allowed it to actually, conceivably, ever, actually, end. We were never going to get a Public Option with the way legislation gets made these days in Washington and, more to the point, it was never obvious exactly what holding-out for the Public Option was going to accomplish, anyway. Scott Brown took this Will-Rogers-no-organizaed-party bullshit and put it in proper perspective for the Will-Rogers-bullshitters. It slapped them hard across the face. They deserved it. But more to the point, it got the thing seriously rolling for the very first time.
Jim Bunning
Mr. Brown's victory in Massachusetts would of course have meant nothing if the hate-inflamed rhetoric of the Republicans in Washington hadn't gone a step too far (or was it about eighty yards too far?) in the personage of a certain Senator Jim Bunning. For those unfamiliar, Bunning is at the best of times a cranky and often overtly incoherent old coot -- even by Republican standards. A man who in this instance applied his consistently un-astute sense for political opportunism to the bad polling numbers for the health care bill, and came up with the brilliant idea of ignoring his own party leadership to launch a one-man filibuster against a completely different, popular, and macroeconomically essential jobs bill. The sound-bites arising from this bizarre decision looked temper-tantrum'y enough, even before Mr. Bunning threw a reporter off an elevator, called him some AM-radio names, and then, just for good measure, gave the reporter and his colleagues in the press corps the finger.
"The Republicans have chosen to give America the finger," came the immediate response from the suddenly clever Democratic message-machine. And it worked. Approval ratings for the Republicans in congress -- already lower than either their Democratic counterparts, or the President -- took the kind of nosedive usually reserved for fuel-starved Mesherschmitts over the forests of Belgium, and suddenly the most articulate and credible Democrats in Washington could appear un-conflicted on the Sunday talk-shows without fear of being painted as cartoon characters in their upcoming election campaigns. Meanwhile Mitch McConnell, who'd already previously tried to get Mr. Bunning not to seek reelection out of fear that his undiagnosed but self-evident dementia would inspire him to do something just this stupid, with just this lack of warning or sensitivity to the party's larger messaging, was left in the uncomfortable position of trying to explain why the senior senator from his own state doesn't want people to have jobs -- instead of explaining how a bill that mandates personal insurance coverage could possibly constitute "a government takeover of health care." The second round of thanks, then, goes to Mr. Bunning.
Jim DeMint
Once upon a time, before any of this -- before Max Baucus, before Joe Lieberman, before Bart Stupak -- there was an idea. A relatively tired idea, a relatively facile and one-dimensional idea, but in American politics these particular strikes against an idea are rarely deal-breakers. The idea in question was, "If we Republicans can defeat this health care bill, it will badly weaken this President in all the same ways that it badly weakened Bill Clinton in 1993 and '94." Lots of Republicans thought it, and lots of Republicans made the mistake of saying it, though goodness knows it didn't seem like a mistake to them at the time, since it played so well to the base of their own party, and anyway it seemed for so much of the last year like it was so inevitable, thanks to all the help they were getting from Baucus, Lieberman, Stupak, et. al.
No one was more vocal, or at least more memorably vocal, on this subject, than Jim DeMint. Speaking in mid-July to one of the numerous front-groups for the insurance lobby that had been ingeniously camouflaged to look like rank-and-file concerned citizens, this one cleverly called "Conservatives for Patients' Rights," Mr. DeMint said, "If we're able to stop him on this, it will be Obama's Waterloo. It will break him." In making such an incendiary and willfully counterproductive remark, a statement that at the time served only to further galvanize his own side, Jim DeMint equipped the President with the sort of in-case-of-emergency-break-glass argument he could use in those last, fateful meetings with the most persuadable but not yet persuaded members of his own congressional caucus: The Republicans would react to the bill's defeat with the same kind of schoolyard bully celebrations, and the same associated electoral momentum, as they had in '93-'94. And during the final few days leading up to last Sunday's House vote, the President argued just that. And it worked. Indeed it is fair to say that without this frame -- without this unforgettable incarnation of the argument that Republicans would fare so much better in the '10 midterms if the bill were to fail -- the critical handful of wavering Democrats in the House would surely have fallen the other way. The last, biggest round of thanks, then, goes to Jim DeMint.
Defeat
No sooner had the whip-count become evident than some of the more thoughtful and circumspect Republican columnists began to opine about the extent to which the GOP's all-in strategy to sink the bill had been suicide from the very beginning -- none more eloquently, or with more arresting consequences for himself, than former Bush speechwriter David Frum, who lamented that the party leadership had caved to its own extremist base, and whose reward for such provocative self-honesty was forced dismissal from his $100,000/year salary at a conservative Washington think-tank. "It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November," he wrote, chastening those from his own party who would celebrate the presentation of a legislative hammer with which to drive the nails of midterm messaging. "[B]y then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the health care bill will be reaching key voting blocs." But more to the point, he argued, "So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This health care bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for [this legislative defeat] now."
What made Mr. Frum's column so inflammatory to certain members of his own party is that in substance it argued that a better strategy for Republicans would have been one rooted in the original principles of shared-power governance, instead of holding the line on the kind of all-out obstructionism that has played so well to the grassroots donors who in these tough economic times have kept the conservative think-tanks solvent. "This time," he wrote, "when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none." The Republicans had been hoping for an Obama Waterloo, and what they got instead was their own Ardennes. Their own, extremist-fueled, under-powered counteroffensive that, through sheer force of numbers alone, was doomed to failure before the first shot was fired.
Implications
Frum's column has attracted the kind of viral attention it deserves among political junkies of all stripe, but the fact that Mr. Frum lost his job for saying what he said is of course the real story here -- in that it highlights the extent to which the extremists among them have hijacked the otherwise delicate and professional job of crafting platform strategy. It's a job for grown-ups, in the end, and when the fulminating partisans take it over with their checkbooks, disaster always follows. Just ask Walter Mondale. Just ask Barry Goldwater. Just ask George McGovern.
Today, after a generation of hate-wing radio and cable entertainment dressed as news, the people making the opinions that lead the future direction of the Republican party are the people who gave rise to all of this infrastructure of hatred by following the direction of the Republican party. It has gone from an institution whose talking-points are crafted by William Buckley, to an institution whose talking-points are being vetted, gong-show style, by folks like Sarah Palin. And just as David Frum has noted, it may still net them some small gains in the '10 midterms, but as a long-term strategy it has so far been nothing short of self-destructive. But the real sign of trouble for the Republicans is that now, with the extent of this extremist takeover now too deeply rooted in donor-dollars to easily undo, it will be next to impossible for the policy leaders in their midst to reverse course -- as evidenced by the self-evidently, jaw-droppingly bad idea of turning around, the moment health care finally passed, and immediately calling for its repeal.
The repeal agenda has the same exact superficial sexiness that the defeat-at-all-costs agenda had in the first place: It puts elected Republicans on friendly footing with the crazies writing the fifty-dollar-at-a-time checks. But it also has, if this is indeed possible, an even greater downside, insofar as the most attractive elements of the legislation are easily framed by Democrats as the targets of would-be repealers. Just look at this excerpt from an e-mail I recently received from the Florida Democratic Party, the trigger for which was the filing of a court case by current state Attorney General and Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill McCollum, contesting the individual mandate:
"...Bill McCollum isn't alone. Governor Charlie Crist and former Speaker Marco Rubio are also some of the loudest members of the repeal caucus of the Republican Party as they fight to appeal to extreme right-wing voters in their Senate primary. We know that McCollum, Crist, and Rubio are fighting to:
* Take away health coverage to 32 million Americans
* Re-open the Medicare Part D 'donut hole' for 565,000 Floridians
* Raise taxes on 216,000 small businesses in Florida.
* Allow millions of Florida children to be denied coverage due to pre-existing conditions
We need the resources to ensure all Floridians learn of their schemes...."
Notice how inconspicuous the word "repeal" is in there? No: The message the Democrats are going to run on in the fall is, "The Republicans want to take away coverage, raise taxes, and open a donut hole in Medicare." If the policy defeat the right-wing just suffered in Washington ended up being their own Ardennes, with this kind of framing the repeal effort will be their Iwo Jima. They will get absolutely clobbered if they allow this case to be made against them by continuing to push for repeal. The low-information set will hear about young people getting tossed off their parents' policies, denials of coverage for preexisting conditions, taxes, donut holes, and, by golly, by the time November comes around, half of those low-information voters will think the Republicans started the whole thing. And, most deliciously of all, at this point -- with the Frum dismissal as the canary tumbling from its perch -- it seems apparent that they have no other choice but to keep hammering this issue anyway, because the small-donor extremists simply won't let them quietly concede defeat, and move on.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
Much of this past year I spent personally expecting the Obama Administration to finally abandon its efforts to pass a major health care bill, and then to reap the consequences of same at the polling stations in 2010 and, perhaps, even 2012. All of that is over now, thanks to three indefatigably persistent individuals -- without any of whose efforts the health insurance reform just passed would still be flopping its dorsal fins on a committee-room table in the bowels of the Senate somewhere. Perfect sense, really: A tough legislative effort with broad scope and sweeping consequences, teeters on the brink of dying a dozen times over, and is ultimately dragged across the finish line thanks to the dogged efforts of a tiny handful of people. Except for one small problem: The three people deserving of all the credit, in this instance, are Scott Brown, Jim Bunning, and Jim DeMint -- all of them, of course, Republicans.
Scott Brown.
The man who was told he had no chance whatsoever to rise from his lowly status as a first-term Massachusetts state senator and seize the United States Senate seat left vacant by the heartrendingly poignant passing of Ted Kennedy (on the very precipice of seeing his own lifelong dream finally fulfilled), ignored all the pundits who told him the state would never give Teddy's seat to a Republican, ignored all the fractious in-fighting attendant to a chronically minority party in a party-machine state, ignored the polls that showed him, at one juncture, over thirty points down to the Democratic nominee (state Attorney General Martha What-The-Christ-Was-Her-Name-Again-I've-Already-Forgotten), and, thanks to a season of Republican fear-mongering about the Democrats' sixty-seat majority and what they were doing with it, plus a few strategically placed gaffes on the part of Ms. Already-Forgotten, came from almost literally out of nowhere, and won -- bringing the always more-cohesive and message-disciplined Republicans to the crucial threshold of 41 seats, in the Senate.
Giddy with the delight of the legislative implications for this stunning upset, noted political columnists from the right-wing began openly chuckling, if not actually thumping their chests. On January 20th Fred Barnes wrote a piece for the Weekly Standard entitled, "The Health Care Bill is Dead." Toward the end of the piece, he wrote, "The health care bill, ObamaCare, is dead with not the slightest prospect of resurrection. Brown ran to be the 41st vote for filibuster and now he is just that. Democrats have talked up clever strategies to pass the bill in the Senate despite Brown, but they won’t fly."
Quite aside from the fact of Mr. Barnes' amusing inability to hyphenate compound verbs like "talked-up," there is the odd dissonance of Mr. Barnes having predicted the demise of something that had already passed both chambers of Congress -- albeit in very slightly different forms. Far from dead, in fact, the bill had received in Scott Brown's victory precisely the kind of this-or-nothing exigency without which it had been paper-cut to pieces by the gun-nut-Democrats on the center right, and the (equally wrong, by the way) FireDogLake crowd, on the extreme left. Brown's victory, and Mr. Barnes should have been comfortably smart enough to realize this, empowered Nancy Pelosi to go to her fractious left-flank and say, with unquestionable credibility, "If you don't vote for the Senate's admittedly more conservative version of the bill, there will be no bill."
Lacking such leverage on her part, we would still be talking about pushed-back deadlines for Mr. Obama's trip to Asia. The first round of thank you's, then, go to Scott Brown, for helping us get this deal done by changing the optics of the bill's end-game in a direction that allowed it to actually, conceivably, ever, actually, end. We were never going to get a Public Option with the way legislation gets made these days in Washington and, more to the point, it was never obvious exactly what holding-out for the Public Option was going to accomplish, anyway. Scott Brown took this Will-Rogers-no-organizaed-party bullshit and put it in proper perspective for the Will-Rogers-bullshitters. It slapped them hard across the face. They deserved it. But more to the point, it got the thing seriously rolling for the very first time.
Jim Bunning
Mr. Brown's victory in Massachusetts would of course have meant nothing if the hate-inflamed rhetoric of the Republicans in Washington hadn't gone a step too far (or was it about eighty yards too far?) in the personage of a certain Senator Jim Bunning. For those unfamiliar, Bunning is at the best of times a cranky and often overtly incoherent old coot -- even by Republican standards. A man who in this instance applied his consistently un-astute sense for political opportunism to the bad polling numbers for the health care bill, and came up with the brilliant idea of ignoring his own party leadership to launch a one-man filibuster against a completely different, popular, and macroeconomically essential jobs bill. The sound-bites arising from this bizarre decision looked temper-tantrum'y enough, even before Mr. Bunning threw a reporter off an elevator, called him some AM-radio names, and then, just for good measure, gave the reporter and his colleagues in the press corps the finger.
"The Republicans have chosen to give America the finger," came the immediate response from the suddenly clever Democratic message-machine. And it worked. Approval ratings for the Republicans in congress -- already lower than either their Democratic counterparts, or the President -- took the kind of nosedive usually reserved for fuel-starved Mesherschmitts over the forests of Belgium, and suddenly the most articulate and credible Democrats in Washington could appear un-conflicted on the Sunday talk-shows without fear of being painted as cartoon characters in their upcoming election campaigns. Meanwhile Mitch McConnell, who'd already previously tried to get Mr. Bunning not to seek reelection out of fear that his undiagnosed but self-evident dementia would inspire him to do something just this stupid, with just this lack of warning or sensitivity to the party's larger messaging, was left in the uncomfortable position of trying to explain why the senior senator from his own state doesn't want people to have jobs -- instead of explaining how a bill that mandates personal insurance coverage could possibly constitute "a government takeover of health care." The second round of thanks, then, goes to Mr. Bunning.
Jim DeMint
Once upon a time, before any of this -- before Max Baucus, before Joe Lieberman, before Bart Stupak -- there was an idea. A relatively tired idea, a relatively facile and one-dimensional idea, but in American politics these particular strikes against an idea are rarely deal-breakers. The idea in question was, "If we Republicans can defeat this health care bill, it will badly weaken this President in all the same ways that it badly weakened Bill Clinton in 1993 and '94." Lots of Republicans thought it, and lots of Republicans made the mistake of saying it, though goodness knows it didn't seem like a mistake to them at the time, since it played so well to the base of their own party, and anyway it seemed for so much of the last year like it was so inevitable, thanks to all the help they were getting from Baucus, Lieberman, Stupak, et. al.
No one was more vocal, or at least more memorably vocal, on this subject, than Jim DeMint. Speaking in mid-July to one of the numerous front-groups for the insurance lobby that had been ingeniously camouflaged to look like rank-and-file concerned citizens, this one cleverly called "Conservatives for Patients' Rights," Mr. DeMint said, "If we're able to stop him on this, it will be Obama's Waterloo. It will break him." In making such an incendiary and willfully counterproductive remark, a statement that at the time served only to further galvanize his own side, Jim DeMint equipped the President with the sort of in-case-of-emergency-break-glass argument he could use in those last, fateful meetings with the most persuadable but not yet persuaded members of his own congressional caucus: The Republicans would react to the bill's defeat with the same kind of schoolyard bully celebrations, and the same associated electoral momentum, as they had in '93-'94. And during the final few days leading up to last Sunday's House vote, the President argued just that. And it worked. Indeed it is fair to say that without this frame -- without this unforgettable incarnation of the argument that Republicans would fare so much better in the '10 midterms if the bill were to fail -- the critical handful of wavering Democrats in the House would surely have fallen the other way. The last, biggest round of thanks, then, goes to Jim DeMint.
Defeat
No sooner had the whip-count become evident than some of the more thoughtful and circumspect Republican columnists began to opine about the extent to which the GOP's all-in strategy to sink the bill had been suicide from the very beginning -- none more eloquently, or with more arresting consequences for himself, than former Bush speechwriter David Frum, who lamented that the party leadership had caved to its own extremist base, and whose reward for such provocative self-honesty was forced dismissal from his $100,000/year salary at a conservative Washington think-tank. "It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November," he wrote, chastening those from his own party who would celebrate the presentation of a legislative hammer with which to drive the nails of midterm messaging. "[B]y then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the health care bill will be reaching key voting blocs." But more to the point, he argued, "So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This health care bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for [this legislative defeat] now."
What made Mr. Frum's column so inflammatory to certain members of his own party is that in substance it argued that a better strategy for Republicans would have been one rooted in the original principles of shared-power governance, instead of holding the line on the kind of all-out obstructionism that has played so well to the grassroots donors who in these tough economic times have kept the conservative think-tanks solvent. "This time," he wrote, "when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none." The Republicans had been hoping for an Obama Waterloo, and what they got instead was their own Ardennes. Their own, extremist-fueled, under-powered counteroffensive that, through sheer force of numbers alone, was doomed to failure before the first shot was fired.
Implications
Frum's column has attracted the kind of viral attention it deserves among political junkies of all stripe, but the fact that Mr. Frum lost his job for saying what he said is of course the real story here -- in that it highlights the extent to which the extremists among them have hijacked the otherwise delicate and professional job of crafting platform strategy. It's a job for grown-ups, in the end, and when the fulminating partisans take it over with their checkbooks, disaster always follows. Just ask Walter Mondale. Just ask Barry Goldwater. Just ask George McGovern.
Today, after a generation of hate-wing radio and cable entertainment dressed as news, the people making the opinions that lead the future direction of the Republican party are the people who gave rise to all of this infrastructure of hatred by following the direction of the Republican party. It has gone from an institution whose talking-points are crafted by William Buckley, to an institution whose talking-points are being vetted, gong-show style, by folks like Sarah Palin. And just as David Frum has noted, it may still net them some small gains in the '10 midterms, but as a long-term strategy it has so far been nothing short of self-destructive. But the real sign of trouble for the Republicans is that now, with the extent of this extremist takeover now too deeply rooted in donor-dollars to easily undo, it will be next to impossible for the policy leaders in their midst to reverse course -- as evidenced by the self-evidently, jaw-droppingly bad idea of turning around, the moment health care finally passed, and immediately calling for its repeal.
The repeal agenda has the same exact superficial sexiness that the defeat-at-all-costs agenda had in the first place: It puts elected Republicans on friendly footing with the crazies writing the fifty-dollar-at-a-time checks. But it also has, if this is indeed possible, an even greater downside, insofar as the most attractive elements of the legislation are easily framed by Democrats as the targets of would-be repealers. Just look at this excerpt from an e-mail I recently received from the Florida Democratic Party, the trigger for which was the filing of a court case by current state Attorney General and Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill McCollum, contesting the individual mandate:
"...Bill McCollum isn't alone. Governor Charlie Crist and former Speaker Marco Rubio are also some of the loudest members of the repeal caucus of the Republican Party as they fight to appeal to extreme right-wing voters in their Senate primary. We know that McCollum, Crist, and Rubio are fighting to:
* Take away health coverage to 32 million Americans
* Re-open the Medicare Part D 'donut hole' for 565,000 Floridians
* Raise taxes on 216,000 small businesses in Florida.
* Allow millions of Florida children to be denied coverage due to pre-existing conditions
We need the resources to ensure all Floridians learn of their schemes...."
Notice how inconspicuous the word "repeal" is in there? No: The message the Democrats are going to run on in the fall is, "The Republicans want to take away coverage, raise taxes, and open a donut hole in Medicare." If the policy defeat the right-wing just suffered in Washington ended up being their own Ardennes, with this kind of framing the repeal effort will be their Iwo Jima. They will get absolutely clobbered if they allow this case to be made against them by continuing to push for repeal. The low-information set will hear about young people getting tossed off their parents' policies, denials of coverage for preexisting conditions, taxes, donut holes, and, by golly, by the time November comes around, half of those low-information voters will think the Republicans started the whole thing. And, most deliciously of all, at this point -- with the Frum dismissal as the canary tumbling from its perch -- it seems apparent that they have no other choice but to keep hammering this issue anyway, because the small-donor extremists simply won't let them quietly concede defeat, and move on.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
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